Being Modern (eBook)

The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century

Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, Morag Shiach (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
438 Seiten
UCL Press (Verlag)
978-1-78735-396-1 (ISBN)

Infos

In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern explores engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940.

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science was a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as 'Science and culture'.

Autor

lt;p>Robert Bud is Research Keeper at the Science Museum in London. His award-winning publications in the history of science include studies of biotechnology and scientific instruments.

Paul Greenhalgh is Director of the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, and Professor of Art History there. He has published extensively in the history of art, design, and the decorative arts in the early modern period.

Frank James is Professor of History of Science at the Royal Institution and University College London. His research formerly centred on Faraday, but now focuses on Davy.

Morag Shiach is Professor of Cultural History at Queen Mary University of London. She has published extensively on the cultural history of modernism and on modernism and labour.

Inhalt

Being Modern: Introduction

Robert Bud and Morag Shiach



Section 1: Science, modernity and culture


1 Multiple modernisms in concert: the sciences, technology and culture in Vienna around 1900


Mitchell G. Ash


2 The cinematic sound of industrial modernity: first notes


Tim Boon


3 Woolf’s atom, Eliot’s catalyst and Richardson’s waves of
light: science and modernism in 1919


Morag Shiach


4 T.S. Eliot: modernist literature, disciplines and the
systematic pursuit of knowledge


Kevin Brazil


Section 2: Tensions over science

5 Modernity and the ambivalent significance of applied science: motors, wireless, telephones and poison gas

Robert Bud

6 ‘The springtime of science’: modernity and the future and
past of science

Frank A.J.L. James

7 ‘Come on you demented modernists, let’s hear from you’:
science fans as literary critics in the 1930s

Charlotte Sleigh


Section 3:
Mathematics and physics

8 Modern by numbers: modern mathematics as a model for
literary modernism

Nina Engelhardt

9 Sculpture in the Belle Epoque: mathematics, art and
apparitions in school and gallery

Lewis Pyenson

10 Architecture, science and purity

Judi Loach

11 A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Ham: wireless,
modernity and interwar nuclear physics  

Jeff Hughes

12 Whose modernism, whose speed? Designing mobility for the
future, 1880s–1945

Ruth Oldenziel

Section 4: Life, biology and the organicist metaphor


13 Ludwig Koch’s birdsong on wartime BBC radio: knowledge,
citizenship and solace


Michael Guida


14 ‘More Modern than the Moderns’: performing cultural
evolution in the Kibbo Kift Kindred


Annebella Pollen


15 Organicism and the modern world: from A.N. Whitehead to
Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence

Craig Gordon

16 Liquid crystal as chemical form and model of thinking in
Alfred Döblin’s modernist science

Esther Leslie

17 ‘I am attracted to the natural order of things’: Le
Corbusier’s rejection of the machine

Tim Benton

Epilogue: Science after modernity

Frank A.J.L. James and
Robert Bud

Select bibliography

Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.10.2018
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Culture • History of Science • Modern • Science
• ISBN-10: 1-78735-396-6 / 1787353966
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78735-396-1 / 9781787353961