Abstract

Abbie Garrington’s Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing explores the modalities of sensory perspective grounded in haptic readings of modernist texts. With examples ranging from manicurists and sculptors to masturbators and palm readers, the book argues that haptic sensory experience facilitates sexual and spiritual contact in the modern imagination. Garrington examines how the psychic spaces of modernism touch the visible/material world, with the hand, palm, and fingers as the primary catalysts. She illuminates the physical and symbolic complexity of literary modernism in important critical, historical, and technological contexts in the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and D.H. Lawrence. Haptic Modernism is notable for its haptic-oriented analyses of how various texts, technologies, and media were received by modernist audiences.

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