Whitworth M.H. Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature

Oxford University Press, 2001. - 254 pp.
The revolution in literary form and aesthetic consciousness called modernism arose as the physical sciences were revising their most fundamental concepts: space, time, matter, and the concept of 'science' itself. The coincidence has often been remarked upon in general terms, but rarely considered in detail. Einstein's Wake argues that the interaction of modernism and the 'new physics' is best understood by reference to the metaphors which structured these developments. These metaphors, widely disseminated in the popular science writing of the period, provided a language with which modernist writers could articulate their responses to the experience of modernity. 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.The Specialist, the Generalist, and the Populist
Things Fall Apart: The Secret Agent and Literary Entropy
Descriptionism: Consuming Sensations
An Entente Cordiale? The New Relations of Literature and Science
Invisible Men and Fractured Atoms
Simultaneity: A Return Ticket to Waterloo
Non-Euclidean HumanitySelect Bibliography