DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Machines for Living

Modernism and Domestic Life

Victoria Rosner author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:4th Feb '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Machines for Living cover

Changes in the routines of domestic life were among the most striking social phenomena of the period between the two World Wars, when the home came into focus as a problem to be solved: re-imagined, streamlined, electrified, and generally cleaned up. Modernist writers understood themselves to be living in an epochal moment when the design and meaning of home life were reconceived. Moving among literature, architecture, design, science, and technology, Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standardization, scientific method, functionalism, efficiency science, and others, that form the basis of literary modernism and stand at the confluence of modernism and modernity. Even as modernist writers criticized the expanding reach of modernization into the home, they drew on its conceptual vocabulary to develop both the thematic and formal commitments of literary modernism. Rosner's work develops a new methodology for interdisciplinary modernist studies and shows how the reinvention of domestic life is central to modernist literature.

The study is well built, justifying its own necessity throughout; the chapters build seamlessly on each other, and every sentence displays a kind of artisanal care. In this regard, it is probably one of the book's strengths that it does not allow itself to get derailed in rehearsing * Václav Paris, James Joyce Quarterly *
Rosner (Columbia Univ.) offers a fresh, interdisciplinary, and prodigiously researched examination of the connection between modernism and the changes in household design and private life that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s...Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * L. Simon, CHOICE *
Rosner establishes clear and persuasive connections between developments in domestic architecture and design and many of the key formal and stylistic characteristics of modernist literature... [Rosner] conclusively demonstrates the centrality of new ideas and theories of the domestic space to modernist literature, and which, in doing so, makes a vital contribution to modernist criticism. * Emma Short, Women: A Cultural Review *

ISBN: 9780198845195

Dimensions: 241mm x 163mm x 20mm

Weight: 672g

308 pages