Books in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series

Examines the ways in which the material culture of the First World War shaped modernism Often studied for its fascination with the shell-shocked mind, modernist literature is also packed with more tangible traces of the First World War, from helmets, trench art and tombstones to shop signs, military newspapers and leaflets dropped from aeroplanes. Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War asks what experimental writers read into these objects and how the conflict prompted a way of thinking of their writings as objects in their own right. Ranging from 1914 to the early 1940s, the chapters in this book explore prose and poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand. Cedric Van Dijck is a postdoctoral fellow in English Literature at the University of Brussels (VUB). He is a co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (2023) and The Intellectual Response to the First World War (2017).

Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx Abstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallace's new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallace's case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Valéry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in Cézanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, and the twenty-first-century legacies of modernist abstraction in two forms: the post-Deleuzian resurgence of interest in the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead; and the act of looking at the abstract canvas in plays by Yasmina Reza, John Logan and Lee Hall. Contrary to habitual associations of abstraction's difficulty with the exclusivity of high modernism, Wallace finds an inclusive and democratic impulse at the heart of the difficulty itself - the promise of an abstraction for all. Jeff Wallace is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Beginning Modernism (2011) and D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005), and has written widely on Lawrence, on science and literature in modern and contemporary writing, and on critical posthumanism. He was a founding editor of the journal Key Words and currently co-edits the series New Literary Theory.

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture.

Lisa Irene Hau argues that a driving force among Greek historians was the desire to use the past to teach lessons about the present and for the future. She uncovers the moral messages of the ancient Greek writers of history and the techniques they used to bring them across.

Popular fiction is seen as a staple of late-20th-century and contemporary lesbian cultural production, but this has largely been perceived as a recent development. The author breaks new ground by providing a kind of pre-history to lesbian cultural identity, where popular genre fictions presented an alternative creative strategy against censorship.

An introduction to the Frankfurt School's important attempts to relate the social, political, and philosophical conditions of modernity to innovations in 20th-century art, literature, and culture. It introduces major figures such as Benjamin and Adorno in a new light, while connecting their ideas with problems in modernist art and culture.

"e;Drawing on a wealth of texts and thinkers, the book shows the distinctive nature of sonic cultures in modernity. Arguing that these cultures are not reducible to sound alone, the book further shows that these encompass representations of sound in 'other' media: especially literature; but also, cinema and painting. Figures discussed include canonical writers such as Joyce, Richardson, and Woolf; relatively neglected writers such as Henry Roth and Bryher; and a whole host of musicians, artists, and other commentators, including Wagner, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, Adorno, and Benjamin. Conceptually as well as topically diverse, the book engages issues such as city noise and 'foreign' accents, representations of sound in 'silent' cinema, the relationship of music to language, and the effects of technology on sonic production and reception. "e;