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.

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.

About the Author
Patrick Armstrong holds a teaching position in the English Department at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France.

Reviews
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781350420182
Author Patrick Armstrong
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC