Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature

by Michael H. Whitworth

Overview

Beginning with influential aspects of nineteenth-century physics, Einstein's Wake qualifies the notion that Einstein alone was responsible for literary "relativity"; it goes on to examine the fine detail of his legacy in literary appropriations of scientific metaphors, with particular attention to Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198186403
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/21/2002
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

University of Wales, Bangor

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Specialist, the Generalist, and the Popularist
2. Things Fall Apart: The Secret Agent and Literary Entropy
3. Descriptionism: Consuming Sensations
4. An Entente Cordiale? The New Relations of Literature and Science
5. Invisible Men and Fractured Atoms
6. Simultaneity: A Return Ticket to Waterloo
7. Non-Euclidean Humanity
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This well-researched and well-documented study...provides an insightful and provocative aid in understanding and revising the fundamental concepts of modernism."—Choice

"This is a well-crafted book about the reception of science (especially physics) by modernist literature in England....What one can learn from this book is a great deal about the popularization of science at the time, about ideas "in the air" and in the social milieu, and about their direct effect on writers of the importance of Conrad, Woolf, and Lewis. Enstien's Wake is a good start at limning pathways of information and figuration from science to literature."—English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

From the Publisher