Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde - (Explorations in Science and Literature) by Rachel Fountain Eames (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

In a book that manages to provide lucid explanations of complex physics concepts, Eames traces a wide range of different paths by which the developments in physics and art in the early twentieth century influenced each other. Filled to the brim with entertaining anecdotes about the various authors and their shocking lives, the text is at its strongest in its ability to highlight the tangential roads of influence between various art movements and developments in physics.
The Modernist Review

About the Author

Rachel Fountain Eames is an academic and creative writer who holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, as has published work on 19th- and 20th-century literature, modern visual art, and science. She can be found on Twitter @rfeames.