Dynamic Form

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form--and even at times becomes a formalism itself--but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment.

As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms--spatial form, pure form, and formlessness--and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

"Dynamic Form offers a new conceptual and historical account of modernism through an emphasis on the intersecting domains of visual and narrative media. The project analyzes texts from the first five decades of the twentieth century alongside sculptures, paintings, photographs, and films in order to show how visuality and non-textual media inflect the shape and movement of modernist narratives. Presents a wide-ranging study of modernist inter-mediation that embraces references to fine-art objects and evocations of painterly genres, as well as visual motifs and modes of viewing and engaging with visual and plastic artworks. Chapters on works by Henry James, Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Evelyn Waugh demonstrate that literary modernism's imbrication with spheres of visuality not only permeates its experiments with form but also calls for a more capacious rethinking of the visual-verbal encounter"--

One of the delights of this monograph is its omnivorous intermediality. Those interested in the interweaving of literary, artistic, and cultural disciplines through modernism will find this study interesting not only for its scope, but for the questions it throws up about a future of modernist studies which attends equally to the different strains of criticism that have shaped the field.

-- "The Modernist Review"