Modernist Informatics

James Purdon is a Research Fellow in English Literature at Cambridge University.

• Introduction: The Government of Information ; 1 / Secret Agents, Official Secrets ; Inspector Heat's Postal Power - Korzeniowski's Dead Letter Box - Insecurity - Inside Knowledge ; 2 / Dossier Fiction ; Abwehr's Looking at You, Kid - Ford's Forms - Black books, black markets - Papers, please - Thrillers ; 3 / Information Collectives ; The national point of view - a mass of unrelated facts - THIS LITTLE OLD E. OF OURS - Connectivity and Collectivity - paper of all kinds broadcast everywhere ; 4 / Public Information ; Information Film - Utility Aesthetics - A Pattern of Thought and Feeling - Informatic Voices ; 5 / Information Blacked Out ; In the gloaming - Keep it Dark - Keep mum - Frankie's Papers, Bowen's Notes - Between the Lines ; Coda: Information Machines

"This stylish study describes how experimental narrative forms registered the transformations and encroachments of a proliferating body of state-managed knowledge in Britain across the first half of the century. Historically meticulous, critically agile, and written with energy and flair, Modernist Informatics offers an altogether original account of modernism's civic engagements." --Marina MacKay, author of Modernism and World War II"Modernist Informatics shows how questions about the control and spread of information shaped the British cultural imaginary from the turn of the century to the Second World War. Purdon's lucid and timely study places fiction, documentary film, and the Mass-Observation movement alongside state policy and wartime censorship in their urgent concern with 'the government of information.'" --Richard Menke, author of Telegraphic Realism: VictorianFiction and Other Information Systems"Modernist Informatics shows James Purdon to be one of the most exciting scholars to have emerged in the field of modernist studies in recent years. The book offers splendid new insights into how the mediation and governance of information was addressed in a wide range of works by major and lesser-known writers in the first half of the twentieth century." --Alex Houen, author of Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to CiaranCarson"This is an original, expertly researched, imaginatively brilliant book, tracking information paranoia in modernist and wartime writing. The book explores the growth of a data/surveillance culture processing subjects into dossiers, informational grids, postal addresses, files and connecting Victorian systematizing of population with the IT revolution of the 1940s and 1950s by sketching forth the missing middle, the sudden expansion of classificatory proceduresinto modes of state biopower." --Adam Piette, author of The Literary Cold War, 1945-Vietnam"James Purdon's luminous, searching study shows how the information age had its beginning not in our digital world but in the historical interval between steam and cybernetics. He seems to have read everything written in this period, and Modernist Informatics deftly shows how information moved pervasively but often undetected between public and private domains. Tenaciously charting the intimate, intricate media ecology of official documents and weavingtogether themes of secrecy, ciphering, sorting, copying, monitoring, interception, and forgery, Purdon shows brilliantly how informatic processes coalesce with the formal and narrative devices of severalcanonical authors, the auto-anthropology of Mass-Observation, and the documentary cinema of John Grierson. An arrestingly new understanding of modernism emerges from alert and supple analyses provided in Modernist Informatics." --Steven Connor, author of Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism