Rereading Modernist Postcards

ebook Critical Studies in Materialist Recovery · Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

By Bradley D. Clissold

cover image of Rereading Modernist Postcards

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today
Libby_app_icon.svg

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

app-store-button-en.svg play-store-badge-en.svg
LibbyDevices.png

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Loading...

Informed by both new and old media theory, materialist approaches to the study of everyday objects, and a series of close readings that chart the critical history of postcard use in the fiction and correspondence of Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James Joyce, and Wilfred Owen, this book locates and attempts to rediscover lost, misplaced, and neglected postcard materialities, as they relate to the archiving, editing, publishing, and fictional repurposing of postcards across Anglo-American Literary Modernism (1880-1939). It argues that postcards need to be recognized as important early twentieth-century communication technologies and distinctly modernist textualities, composed of multimedia, recto–verso intertextualities. Moreover, their material limitations encourage users to inscribe messages often in fragmented language forms and innovative cultural shorthands (a.k.a. postcardese). This study redresses the ongoing, widespread scholarly neglect of signifying postcard materialities in modernist studies and the editorial silencing of postcard features in collections of published author correspondence. It also stresses that for these four literary figures of modernism, the material choice of a postcard for communicating is always as much the (meta)message, as any of the signifying materialities they carry uploaded onto their platforming surfaces.

Rereading Modernist Postcards