Overview

Modernism reshaped novel theory, shifting criticism away from readers' experiences and toward the work as an object autonomous from any reader. Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain excavates technology's crucial role in this evolution and offers a new history of modernism's vision of the novel. To many modernists, both novel and machine increasingly seemed to merge into the experiences of readers or users. But modernists also saw potential for a different understanding of technology - in pre-modern machines, or the technical functioning of technologies stripped of their current social roles. With chapters on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West, Novel Theory argues that in these alternative visions of technology, modernists found models for how the novel might become an autonomous, intellectual object rather than a familiar experience, and articulated a future for the novel by imagining it as a new kind of machine.

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9781108426046

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Reviews

'... Fielding offers a valuable discussion of modernist theories of the novel that renews ongoing debates over aesthetic divisions between high culture and mass culture, while also showing how these theories are often modulated through discourses of technology. Her knowledge of narrative theory and modernist aesthetics is impressive, and her readings make important contributions to the scholarship on James, Ford, Lewis, and West. Her extensive research also draws attention to figures such as Percy Lubbock and Q. D. Leavis who helped to shape the ways in which modernist novelists thought about form. Fielding's book brings into focus a fascinating debate over the aesthetics and epistemology of the modern novel as a technology for knowing.' Andrew Gaedtke, Modernism/modernity 'Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain is an exacting study ... Fielding admirably succeeds in carrying her own readers through this patient analysis of the formal strategies and critical theories the four writers (Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West) she analyzes developed to mount a 'resistance to reading'.' Damien Keane, Twentieth-Century Literature 'This is the value of Fielding's intervention: it is almost tailor-made for answering [Michaela] Bronstein's call for clear alternatives to the context-based historicist approaches to modernism, even as Fielding is interested in making arguments about changes in literature over time.' Shawna Ross, The Year's Work in English Studies

Author Information

Heather Fielding is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Honors College at Purdue University Northwest in Westville and Hammond, Indiana.

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