Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the intersection of British literature and the human sciences of ethnography, sexology and psychology at the dawn of the twentieth century. By analyzing literary texts alongside scientific ones, Paul Peppis demonstrates how these competing disciplines participated in the formation of modernism as a broad, cross-disciplinary cultural movement.
Trade Review'Peppis brings … close reading skills to ten early modernist texts … to show that literature and science, rather than being antithetical 'discourses' were subtly collaborative in the engineering of high modernism's 'black boxes'.' The Times Literary Supplement
'Scholars of English literary modernism will find Sciences of Modernism a significant contribution to the field. Meticulously researched, Paul Peppis's most recent book positions a diverse series of early twentieth-century books in historical context as well as in critical tradition.' T. Hugh Crawford, Modern Philology
Table of ContentsIntroduction; Part I. Ethnographies: 1. Salvage ethnography, cultural cross-dressing, and autoethnography in A. C. Haddon's Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown; 2. Salvaging dialect, cultural cross-dressing, and antiethnographic autoethnography in Claude McKay's Constab Ballads; Part II. Sexologies: 3. Homosexual Bildung and sexological modernism in Havelock Ellis and John A. Symonds's Sexual Inversion and E. M. Forster's Maurice; 4. Re-writing sex: sexology and sentimental modernism in Marie Stopes's Married Love and Mina Loy's Songs to Joannes; Part III. Psychologies: 5. Treating trauma, modernizing narrative: Bernard Hart's The Psychology of Insanity and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier; 6. 'Mental Cases': forms of shellshock in William Brown's Psychology and Psychotherapy and Poems by Wilfred Owen; Conclusion.
