Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on literary modernism and its cultural and historical contexts. In this innovative study aimed at a general audience, Tim Armstrong seeks to define modernism not only by its aesthetics and literary genres but also by its links with broader cultural areas in which the 'modern' is implicated and debated, and which inform its representational modes.

Modernism: A Cultural History explores modernism's struggle with a split temporality in which the old and the emerging new struggle, and in which, with the horror of the Great War, notions of a traumatic or 'frozen' time emerge. It considers such topics as modernism, market culture and obscurity; the culture of science and technology; politics, economics, eugenics, and sexology; primitivism and race; cinema and sound recording; gender and modernism; and the study of consciousness and the senses. It portrays modernism less as a movement in revolt from the modern world than as attempting to engage with that world: the cry of 'reform!' which characterizes much of post-enlightenment thought is used to describe modernist writers' engagement with politics or bodies as well as with inherited style. In this wide-ranging study, a parade of writers - from the canonical like Pound, Eliot and Woolf to less well-known figures like Mary Butts, Muriel Rukeyser and Sterling Brown - are considered, and literary movements like Imagism, Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance are drawn into the debate.

Students and scholars alike, of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, will find the breadth, clarity and fresh approach of this text invaluable.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• 1 Modernity, Modernism and Time
• 2 Mapping Modernism
• 3 Modernism, Mass Culture and the Market
• 4 Reform! Bodies, Selves, Politics, Aesthetics
• 5 The Self and the Senses
• 6 The Vibrating Universe: Science, Spiritualism, Technology
• 7 Modernism's Others: Race and Empire
• References and Further Reading

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Employing an expansive definition of "modernism," Armstrong (modern literature, Royal Holloway, Univ. of London, UK) ranges widely over British, American, and Continental literature and culture to explore the links among them. The result is a fast-paced narrative in which familiar names and titles jostle with some that will ring no bells for inexperienced readers. Armstrong does write with a minimum of critical jargon and he gives full references in 15 pages of primary and secondary sources. Even so, reading this book may be an overwhelming experience for many, and the index is not up to the task of locating the plethora of names the author mentions in the text. The impressive range of ingeniously interrelated topics includes the origins of modernism in the Industrial Revolution and the market economy; reform agendas in modern culture aimed at personal and social improvement; ideas of the self and sense experience; preoccupations with race and empire; and the impact of technology, science, and pseudoscience in modern life, with an especially imaginative section on spiritualism. Modernity rather than narrowly defined literary modernism is the governing concept in this work, which will prove rich (and daunting) for readers in various disciplines. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. S. Vogeler emerita, California State University, Fullerton

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.