What happens to form in a time of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and multivalent logics? And how might we better categorise the modernist avant-garde's confrontation with such complex and contradictory formalisms? Anexact Form and Modernist Culture presents a soft taxonomy of the long mid-century avant-garde's fuzzy, grey, and viscous forms while investigating the aesthetic and affective valences of that which is 'essentially and not accidentally inexact', as Edmund Husserl writes in Ideas I (1913). Across five chapters on doodles and inkblots; iridescent surfaces and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the groovy aesthetics of industrial chemistry Anexact Form and Modernist Culture offers a unique examination of avant-garde art and literature in a time of unprecedented err, smudge, ooze and wriggle.

About the Author
James Reath is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Exeter (2023-2027). He received his PhD in English Literature from University College London (UCL) in 2022 and has held visiting fellowships at Yale University (2021) and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin (2022).


Book Information
ISBN 9781399547499
Author James Reath
Format Hardback
Page Count 312
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press