Haptic Modernism offers the first substantial account of the representation of the haptic sense modality in literature of the modernist period. That modality combines touch, kinaesthesis (the body’s sense of its own movement), proprioception (bodily orientation), and the vestibular sense (registering balance), four areas of sensory experience undergoing radical shifts, and new conceptualisations, in response to technological and scientific innovations in the modernist years. The work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence and Rebecca West is considered alongside oth ... More

Haptic Modernism offers the first substantial account of the representation of the haptic sense modality in literature of the modernist period. That modality combines touch, kinaesthesis (the body’s sense of its own movement), proprioception (bodily orientation), and the vestibular sense (registering balance), four areas of sensory experience undergoing radical shifts, and new conceptualisations, in response to technological and scientific innovations in the modernist years. The work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence and Rebecca West is considered alongside other, non-canonical fictions, as well as scientific, philosophical, and journalistic accounts of bodily experiences in the realm of touch and the tactile. In a series of extended readings of significant novels, the book weaves together studies of the X-ray, atomic structure, the cinema spectator experience, the look-which-touches of the sculpture viewer, the touch-which-looks of the blind, the process of manicure, literary treatments of the writing hand, muscular responses to motorcar travel, and frightening tales of split skins, split selves, and severed hands run amok. Haptic Modernism asks why it is that modernist texts of various stripes return with unprecedented alacrity to the haptic experiences of the human body. On the other hand, it seeks to identify clusters of haptic happenings within modernist texts as a means of understanding the touch-transforming social and historical contexts out of which those writings emerge.