Mess is age-old and universal, as phenomenon and as topic. The evidence collected in this book suggests, however, that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the first stirrings in Western culture of a primary interest in mess for its own sake. Messes, like modern identities, happen by accident; their representation in painting and fiction made it possible to think boldly and inventively about chance. Ranging widely--from Turner to Degas, and from Melville to Maupassant and the New Woman writers--this book outlines a style of commentary on modern life in which the ancient dichotomy of order and chaos was supplanted by a distinction between different kinds of mess.

Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction

Arts & Photography

Trotter, David

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

What provoked the fierce and systematic "will to experiment" that was Modernism? Seeking an answer to this question, David Trotter examines the careers of Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis as well as the early psychiatric literature and case-histories of paranoia. The result is a new and unexpected approach to the preoccupations with gender and with the politics of culture that currently characterize the study of the period.

Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

In Britain and other Commonwealth countries, it is convention rather than law that determines many crucial questions of government behavior. This timely volume examines these major conventions and practices, including rules governing the activities of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, and the Crown; the doctrines of collective and individual responsibilities of ministers to parliament; and the principles of accountability applicable to public servants.

Constitutional Conventions: The Rules and Forms of Political Accountability

Science & Math

History & Philosophy

This book is about some of the ways in which the world got ready to be connected, long before the advent of the technologies and the concentrations of capital necessary to implement a global 'network society'. It investigates the prehistory not of the communications 'revolution' brought about by advances in electronic digital computing from 1950 onwards, but of the principle of connectivity which was to provide that revolution with its justification and rallying-cry. Connectivity's core principle is that what matters most in any act of telecommunication, and sometimes all that matters, is the fact of its having happened. During the nineteenth century, the principle gained steadily increasing traction by means not only of formal systems such as the telegraph, but of an array of improvised methods and signalling devices. These methods and devices fulfilled not just an ever more urgent need, but a fundamental recurring desire, for near-instantaneous real-time communication at a distance. Connectivity became an end in itself: a complex, vivid, unpredictable romance woven through the enduring human desire and need for remote intimacy. Its magical enhancements are the stuff of tragedy, comedy, satire, elegy, lyric, melodrama, and plain description; of literature, in short. The book develops the concepts of signal, medium, and interface to offer, in its first part, an alternative view of writing in Britain from George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to D.H. Lawrence, Hope Mirrlees, and Katherine Mansfield; and, in its second, case-studies of European and African-American fiction, and of interwar British cinema, designed to open the topic up for further enquiry.

The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface, 1850-1950

Circulation: Defoe, Dickens, and the Economies of the Novel

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The poetry of Abraham Cowley

Macmillan

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &amp; Francis, an informa company.

The English Novel Hist 1895-1920

Reference

Routledge

Written especially for students and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, David Trotter's "The English Novel in History 1895-1920" provides a comprehensive introduction to early 20th-century fiction This study embraces the whole range of early 20th-century fiction, from avant-garde innovations to popular mass-market genres. Separate sections are devoted to James, Conrad, Kipling, Bennett, Lawrence, Lewis, and Joyce. It establishes a classification of literary styles in the period. Based on this classification, it offers an account of the subject-matters which preoccupied writers of all kinds: gender, race, nationality, sexual psychology, production and consumption. "The English Novel in History" aims to redefine our understanding of literary Modernism, and should be useful reading for all students of modern English literature.

English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (The Novel in History)

Contemporary

The period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature, David Trotter argues, stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to portray communication by telephone, television, radio, and sound cinema--and to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they filled up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life.
New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, Trotter observes, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars. In defining what they achieved, this book creates a new literary canon of works distinguished formally and thematically by their alertness to the implications of new media and new materials.

Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars

Harvard University Press

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The Poetry of Abraham Cowley

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

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