Book Description

The first comprehensive reference book to define and delineate the intersections of modernism and technology Though modernism's emergence in an environment of techno-cultural acceleration has long been recognised, recent scholarship has deepened and challenged our understanding of the connections between twentieth-century cultural production and its technological interlocutors. In twenty-eight chapters by leading academics, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology re-examines the machines and media that functioned as modernism's contexts and competitors. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by the theoretical and socio-historical frames of current teaching and research on modernism and technology, this research volume makes a crucial and timely intervention in the field of modernist studies. The scholarly contributions on machines that govern transport, production and public utilities, on media and communication technologies, on the intersections of technology with the human body, and on the technological systems of the early twentieth century capture the contemporary state of modernist technology studies and chart the future directions of this vibrant area. The Editors Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature & Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019), Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of Reading Westworld (2019) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009). Ian Whittington is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945 (2018) as well as a number of essays on radio studies and twentieth-century British, Irish, and Anglophone literature, and is editor of a special issue of The Global South on 'Radio Cultures of the Global South' (2022).