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.

Autorentext
Patrick Armstrong holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, UK. He has taught at Cambridge, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Université d'Orléans, France.

Inhalt

Introduction: Microscopy and the Optical Imagination
Chapter 1: Microbiology and the Modern Novel: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow
Chapter 2: Eyes and Microscopes: Marcel Proust's Pluralizing Vision
Chapter 3: Extensions and Limitations of Vision in Virginia Woolf's Prose
Chapter 4: Joyce. Radek. Eisenstein.. Beckett: Magnification in Murphy
Conclusion: Micro to Nano
Bibliography