Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that show how vibrations provide a means of bridging science and art - two fields that became increasingly separate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.

This book offers an innovative examination of the interactions of science and technology, art, and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars in the history of art, literature, architecture, computer science, and media studies focus on five historical themes in the transition from energy to information: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, inscription, information theory, and virtuality. Different disciplines are grouped around specific moments in the history of science and technology in order to sample the modes of representation invented or adapted by each field in response to newly developed scientific concepts and models. By placing literary fictions and the plastic arts in relation to the transition from the era of energy to the information age, this collection of essays discovers unexpected resonances among concepts and materials not previously brought into juxtaposition. In particular, it demonstrates the crucial centrality of the theme of energy in modernist discourse. Overall, the volume develops the scientific and technological side of the shift from modernism to postmodernism in terms of the conceptual crossover from energy to information. The contributors are Christoph Asendorf, Ian F. A. Bell, Robert Brain, Bruce Clarke, Charlotte Douglas, N. Katherine Hayes, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Bruce J. Hunt, Douglas Kahn, Timothy Lenoir, W. J. T. Mitchell, Marcos Novak, Edward Shanken, Richard Shiff, David Tomas, Sha Xin Wei, and Norton Wise.

R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the manifestoes that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema. The cinema, Elder argues, became, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape. To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that opens up some broad topics concerning modernity’s cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within that regime engendered some peculiar, and highly questionable, epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. Through this discussion, Elder advances the startling claim that a crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity engendered, by way of response, a peculiar sort of “pneumatic (spiritual) epistemology.” Elder then shows that early ideas of the cinema were strongly influenced by this pneumatic epistemology and uses this conception of the cinema to explain its pivotal role in shaping two key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a pure, “objectless” (non-representational) art and Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism.

Explores the 'still life spirit' in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetryChallenges the conventional positioning of still life a 'minor' genre in art historyProposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual cultureProvides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and danceUncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace StevensThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Czanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm; an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

Contrary to the common view that cultural modernism is a broadly anti-mimetic movement, one which turned away from traditional artistic goals of representing the world, Rhythmic Modernism argues that rhythm and mimesis are central to modernist aesthetics. Through detailed close readings of non-fiction and short stories, Helen Rydstrand shows that textual rhythms comprised the substance of modernist mimesis. Rhythmic Modernism demonstrates how many modernist writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, were profoundly invested in mimicking a substratum of existence that was conceived as rhythmic, each displaying a fascination with rhythm, both as a formal device and as a vital, protean concept that helped to make sense of the complex modern world.

This first book-length study of D. H. Lawrence’s lifelong engagement with music surveys his extensive musical interests and how these permeate his writing, while also situating Lawrence within a growing body of work on music and modernism. A twin focus considers the music that shaped Lawrence’s novels and poetry, as well as contemporary developments in music that parallel his quest for new forms of expression. Comparisons are made with the music of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wagner, and British composers, including Bax, Holst and Vaughan Williams, and with the musical writings of Forster, Hardy, Hueffer (Ford), Nietzsche and Pound. Above all, by exploring Lawrence and music in historical context, this study aims to open up new areas for study and a place for Lawrence within the field of music and modernism.

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism, Science, and Technology surveys the scientific contexts of writers from H.G. Wells and Gertrude Stein to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the ways in modernist writers responded to these paradigm shifts. Introducing key concepts from science studies and their implications for the study of modernist literature, the book includes chapters covering the physical sciences, mathematics, life sciences, social sciences and 'pseudosciences'. Including a timeline of key developments and guides to further reading, this is an essential guide to students and researchers studying the topic at all levels.