Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city of New York, the book argues that the poetry of modernist women that engages with, examines or critiques the new leisure technologies of their era is fundamentally changed by the encounter with that technology. The chapters in the book focus on shopping, advertising, dance, film, radio and phonography, on city spaces such as Coney Island, Greenwich Village and Harlem, and on poetry that embraces the linguistic and formal innovations of modernism whilst paying close attention to the embodied politics of gender. The technologized city, and the leisure cultures and media forms emerging from it, enabled modernist women writers to re-imagine forms of lyric embodiment, inspired by the impact of technology on modern ideas of selfhoodand subjectivity.

Focuses particularly on American women writers and the city of New York Studies the politics and spatiality of gender in the city Highlights the various sites where the poetry of modernist women intersects with technological inventions for amusement

Autorentext

Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Technicity and the American Techno-city.- 2. Let's Go Shopping.- 3. Amusing Spaces.- 4. Dancing Bodies.- 5. Feminine Projections.- 6. Sound Machines.- 7. Epilogue: Digital Humanities and Posthuman Feminist Modernism.