Modernist Intimacies

'This compelling book demonstrates the pivotal role of modernist aesthetics in the cultivation of modern intimacies. Ranging widely across media, these essays explore intimacy through the affects, forms, and proximate histories that made private life - for the moderns - a public and deeply political matter. A smart pre-history of the mediated intimacy of the contemporary.' Justus Nieland, Michigan State University Illuminates the new and unsettling forms of intimacy explored in modernist literature and art Modernist Intimacies traces modern intimacy back to the first decades of the twentieth century, showing that modernism played a crucial role in its emergence. Intimacy can no longer be seen as an exclusively private, familiar sphere of life independent of sociopolitical realities, and the twelve chapters present incisive, original perspectives on intimacy as a vital dimension of modernist aesthetic and social practices. They engage topics from music-making, wartime radio broadcasting and transnational relations to diary-writing, sexual pleasure, queer religiosity and same-sex love. In attending to a wide range of print literary texts as well as other media such as church murals and sonic archives, the book also points to the resonance of modernist intimacies in our own time. Elsa Högberg is a research fellow at the Department of English, Uppsala University. Cover image: Gosse vid blomsterbordet (1916) by Sigrid Hjertén; photograph by Bukowskis Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-4183-4 Barcode