Affective Materialities

“A dynamic reexamination of what modernist representations of the self can teach us about the way culture has defined which bodies ‘matter’ and how modern artists resist those boundaries by depicting the body as a creative site of trans-corporeality.”—Kelly Sultzbach, author of Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden

“Putting the insights of ecology and affect studies into conversation and covering a wide range of subjects from Prufrock to puppies, Affective Materialities provides an impressive toolkit for anyone interested in the myriad ways that the modernist body matters.”—Brian Glavey, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis

“From Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts’s introductory essay on ether, through Karen Guendel’s reflections on flesh and granite and William Kupinse’s on ‘cold crystal,’ the essays weave together some of the most radically anti-humanist strands of affect theory and new materialism. They also show that these late twentieth-century theoretical standpoints describe modernist aesthetic attitudes very well.”—Modernism/modernity

“These essays seek to uncover how modernist writers not just represented the body, but theorized it. This collection does valuable service in instigating a conversation about embodiment and how we might read with a sense of what modernism makes available to citizens of the contemporary world.”—Studies in the Novel