Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction - by Patrick Armstrong (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Patrick Armstrong holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, UK. He has taught at Cambridge, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Université d'Orléans, France.