Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain

Reveals that technology played a major role in modernism's theory of the novel.

Heather Fielding (Author)

9781108426046, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 April 2018

206 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.42 kg

'This is the value of Fielding's intervention: it is almost tailor-made for answering [Michaela] Bronstein's call for clear alternatives to the context-based historicist approaches to modernism, even as Fielding is interested in making arguments about changes in literature over time.' Shawna Ross, The Year's Work in English Studies

Modernism reshaped novel theory, shifting criticism away from readers' experiences and toward the work as an object autonomous from any reader. Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain excavates technology's crucial role in this evolution and offers a new history of modernism's vision of the novel. To many modernists, both novel and machine increasingly seemed to merge into the experiences of readers or users. But modernists also saw potential for a different understanding of technology - in pre-modern machines, or the technical functioning of technologies stripped of their current social roles. With chapters on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West, Novel Theory argues that in these alternative visions of technology, modernists found models for how the novel might become an autonomous, intellectual object rather than a familiar experience, and articulated a future for the novel by imagining it as a new kind of machine.

Introduction. Readers and machines in modernist novel theory
1. Point of view as projector: Henry James, Percy Lubbock, and the modernist management of reading
2. What carries the novel: Ford Madox Ford, Impressionist connectivity, and the telephone
3. 'Every age has been 'a machine age'': Wyndham Lewis and the novel's technological temporality
4. From empathy to the super-cortex: Rebecca West's technics of the novel
Conclusion. Novel theory and technology in late Modernism.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA], Literature & literary studies [D]