Haptic Modernism

Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing

von Abbie Garrington

256 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

The first substantial account of the representation of the haptic in literature of the modernist periodHaptic Modernism focuses on areas of sensory experience which were being re-conceptualised in response to technological and scientific innovations in the modernist years: touch, kinaesthesis, proprioception and the vestibular sense. The work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson and D. H. Lawrence is considered in detail alongside non-canonical fictions and scientific, philosophical and journalistic accounts of bodily experiences in the realm of touch and the tactile.In a series of extended readings of significant novels, the book weaves together studies of the X-ray, atomic structure, the cinema spectator experience, the look-which-touches of the sculpture viewer, the touch-which-looks of the blind, the process of manicure, literary treatments of the writing hand, muscular responses to motorcar travel and frightening tales of split skins, split selves and severed hands. Haptic Modernism asks why it is that modernist texts are taken with the haptic experiences of the human body. And it seeks to identify clusters of haptic happenings within modernist texts as a means of understanding the touch-transforming social and historical contexts out of which those writings emerge.Key Features- Offers a coherent history of ideas of the haptic, tracing their impact on literary innovation- Analyses the transformations of haptic experience in the modernist period, and its roots in developments in mechanised transport, the cinema, contemporary science and the rapidly modernising city- Provides in-depth studies of the work of Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence and Richardson from a new, haptic-oriented perspective, shedding new light on familiar figures of the modernist avant-garde- Puts literary experiments with the haptic in the context of work on touch in other fields

• Themen: Biographie, Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft Geschichte und Kritik Literaturtheorie
• ISBN: 9781474401425
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 29.05.2015
• Größe: 236 x 157 mm
• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press