This book examines how readers and novelists alike have used maps, guidebooks, and other geographical media to imagine and represent the space of the novel from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Bringing together Canadian, American, and British scholars, this volume explores the relationship between modernism and modern celebrity culture. In support of the collection's overriding thesis that modern celebrity and modernism are mutually determining phenomena, the contributors take on a range of transatlantic canonical and noncanonical figures, from the expected (Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the surprising (Elvis and Hitler). Illuminating case studies are balanced by the volume's attentiveness to broader issues related to modernist aesthetics, as the contributors consider celebrity in relationship to identity, commodification, print culture, personality, visual cultures, and theatricality. As the first book to read modernism and celebrity in the context of the crises of individual agency occasioned by the emergence of mass-mediated culture, Modernist Star Maps argues that the relationship between modernism and the popular is unthinkable without celebrity. Moreover, celebrity's strange evolution during the twentieth century is unimaginable without the intercession of modernism's system of cultural value. This innovative collection opens new avenues for understanding celebrity not only for modernist scholars but for critical theorists and cultural studies scholars.

This is the first study of the literary theories of H. G. Wells, the founding father of English science fiction and once the most widely read writer in the world. It explores his entire career, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, and prophecy, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction.

The first full-length account of modernism from the perspective of literary geography.

This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific” foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.

Publisher Description

Most research and writing on railway history has been undertaken in a way that disconnects it from the wider cultural milieu. Authors have been very effective at constructing specialist histories of transport, but have failed to register the railway's central importance in the representation and understanding of modernity. This book brings together contributions from a range of established scholars in a variety of disciplines with the central purpose of exploring the railway less as a transport technology than as a key signifier of capitalist modernity. It examines the complex social relations in which the railway became historically embedded, identifying it as a central problematic in the cultural experience of modernity. It avoids the limitations of both the close-sighted empiricism typical of many transport historians and the long-sighted generalizations of cultural commentators who view the railway merely as a shorthand for the concept of progress over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book draws on a diverse range of materials, including literary and historical forms of representation. It is also informed by a creative application of various critical theories.

This book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.