Portable modernisms : the art of traveling light / Emily Ridge.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ridge, Emily, 1983- author.

Series:

Edinburgh critical studies in modernist culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Modernism (Literature).

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 211 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2017]

Summary:

A wide-ranging study of the rise of a new culture of portability and its impact on modernist approaches to fiction, Luggage is an overlooked detail in the stock sketch of the expatriated modernist writer from the valise-fashioned desks of both James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to the lost manuscript-laden cases of Ernest Hemingway and Walter Benjamin. While the trope of modernist exile has long been spotlighted, little attention has been given to the material meaning of this condition. What things and objects do modernism's exiles and émigrés carry with them and how does the act of carriage enter into the modernist picture more broadly? What are the implications and historical resonances of a portable outlook, particularly from the angles of gender, wartime conflict and character conception? Above all, how far does such an outlook impact upon artistic vision? Portability represents the simultaneous transportation and repudiation of domesticity and the home, those key frames of reference in the nineteenth-century novel. This book examines the multifarious ways in which the emergence of a modern culture of portability prompts a radical, if often problematic, departure from Victorian architectural conceptions of fiction towards more movable understandings of form and character. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 'Living modernly's living quickly': Towards Travelling Light 31

2 'A purse of her own': Women and Carriage 66

3 'No one is safe from the beggar's pack': Portability and Precarity 108

4 'Have you anything to declare?': Portable Selves on Trial 144.

Notes:

Includes bibliogaphical references (pages 191-204) and index.

ISBN:

9781474419598

1474419593

OCLC:

969424802