Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett

Exploring how modernism registered shock experiences of the microscopic and extended vision in prose fiction through the work of four modernist writers – D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett – this book is the first substantial study of the interrelations between microscopy and modernist fiction.

Illustrating ways in which optical instruments had the capacity to change, displace and reframe ideas of what the world is like, this book argues that encounters with th...