Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction
Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:23rd Jul '26
£28.99
This title is due to be published on 23rd July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Exploring how modernism registered shock experiences of the microscopic and extended vision in prose fiction through the work of four modernist writers – D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett – this book is the first substantial study of the interrelations between microscopy and modernist fiction.
Illustrating ways in which optical instruments had the capacity to change, displace and reframe ideas of what the world is like, this book argues that encounters with the microscopic are often depicted as thresholds between the human and the non-human, in ways that reverberate through modernist fiction.
Exploring a period of significant developments in microscopical tools and techniques, from the light microscope to the electron microscope, this book traces a shift that reconfigured the limits of the observable.
This is an impressive book that demonstrates not only depth and rigor in scholarship, but also a really imaginative range of engagements – scientific, artistic, literary and performative. * Patricia Waugh, Professor Emeritus, Durham University, UK *
The ways we inform intuition in ecological relations become both a crucial problem and an empowerment, as Armstrong astutely proceeds to demonstrate in his deeply researched chapters. * Green Letters *
His book offers, yes, many new insights into how literary modernists thought about vision, and makes a very valuable contribution to the expanding interdisciplinary field of literature and science. * Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies *
Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on modernism’s engagement with scientific knowledge. * The British Society for Literature and Science *
ISBN: 9781350420458
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages