Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde

Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities

Rachel Fountain Eames

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350299825
• eBook ISBN: 9781350299849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Relative measure: William Carlos Williams’s Einsteinian poetics
• 2 Mina Loy’s energy physics
• 3 The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s physical systems
• 4 The quantum poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 – Parallel timeline
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint