Keele University Professor Scott McCracken
Touch is the most neglected sense in literary studies. In this remarkable book, Abbie Garrington makes good that neglect and opens up a whole new field of research. Haptic Modernism offers original interpretations of Joyce, Woolf, Richardson, and Lawrence and introduces us to a radical understanding of bodily responses to the technologies of modernity.
University of Liverpool Dr Alexandra Harris
This is a beautifully controlled study of literary hands as they write, point, stroke, trace, and tease. At the same time it is an expansive, audacious and supremely well-handled study of what it means to touch and be touched, to feel and be felt. Haptic Modernism establishes Abbie Garrington as one of the most compelling voices in the rapidly-evolving critical conversation about literature and ‘the business of the bodily’.
In a series of revelatory close readings, Garrington parses gestural sign languages in the work of Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence. Familiar texts take on startlingly unfamiliar shapes when we keep in mind Woolf’s hand held out to the palm-reader and Lawrence’s extraordinary affirmation that his hand ‘flickers with a life of its own’.
Garrington’s prose is alive too. She writes with infectious energy, lyrical precision, and a certain sly ingenuity that allows her to seize hold of ideas lurking far beneath the skin of some of modernity’s most challenging texts. Knowing that language matters in ‘making manifest’ the work of the hands, she takes us on a linguistic adventure. Rarely is the glossary at the end of a book particularly diverting. The dictionary of tactile terms offered here is, like the whole book, both a joy and an education.
