Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)

Explores how modernist fiction interrogated the many promises of ubiquitous media connectivity as key to collective life. In Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life, Aleksandr Prigozhin explores how modernist fiction responded to its changing media environment in the early twentieth century.Modernist writers used diverse forms of media, broadly conceived-from print, architecture, and radio to soil and infrastructure-as metaphors for the contradictions of common life, while highlighting both the promises and failures of media modernity. Media's complex relationship to affect and sociality allowed modernists to imagine how disparate lives might be linked together through modes of impersonal intimacy.Through close readings of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Andrei Platonov, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among others, Prigozhin reveals how their works leverage media's ability to connect and divide.These texts grapple with the challenges of mass democracy, imperial decline, and the