ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increased attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent interest to explore engagements 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 history of science and technology, art, architecture, and English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science was a critical part.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"""The essays are well researched and one of the strengths of this collections is that it provides a wide-ranging view of engagement with, and interpretations of, scientific knowledge. This range testifies to the editors’ sensitivity toward the growing literature in this area, which has moved beyond taking academic physics—particularly relativity—as providing the archetypal scientific concepts of modernity... Overall, this book contributes an interesting and diverse collection of specific cases that will be a resource for scholars of modernity in multiple disciplines. It is freely available online in its entirety on the UCL Press website, a boon for accessibility that promises to be especially useful for students.""
Galina Shyndriayeva
H-Net Reviews"

"Being Modern's aim to initiate wider discussions about the role of science in studies of modernity across cultural studies, English literature, art history and the history of science is met through the wealth of papers and clear editorial direction. This book provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of the period broadly concerned with the culture of modernity.'
The British Journal for the History of Science"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

"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"