Face and Form

Anca Parvulescu is Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Laughter: Notes on a Passion (2010), The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (2014), and, with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (2022) – winner of the René Wellek Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literature, offered by the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Barrington Moore Award for Best Book in Comparative and Historical Sociology, offered by the American Sociological Association.

• Introduction; 1. Aschenbach's makeover: physiognomic faces in death in Venice; 2. A personal style of face: proust and the physiognomy of women; 3. The biography of a face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando; 4. The face of a genius: Picasso, Stein, and the struggle with facial form; 5. Translated faces: Kōbō Abe's the face of another; Coda: Instagram face; Bibliography.

'Face and Form reassesses the centrality of physiognomy in the modernist perception to ask what we can learn from it today. This book is a remarkable contribution to modernist studies, and a timely response to the ongoing debates on facial recognition technologies and the politics of COVID-19.' Katja Haustein, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, University of Kent