Sciences of Modernism

Paul Peppis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 2000) and has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge, 2007) and The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (Cambridge, 2007). He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

• Introduction; Part I. Ethnographies: 1. Salvage ethnography, cultural cross-dressing, and autoethnography in A. C. Haddon's Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown; 2. Salvaging dialect, cultural cross-dressing, and antiethnographic autoethnography in Claude McKay's Constab Ballads; Part II. Sexologies: 3. Homosexual Bildung and sexological modernism in Havelock Ellis and John A. Symonds's Sexual Inversion and E. M. Forster's Maurice; 4. Re-writing sex: sexology and sentimental modernism in Marie Stopes's Married Love and Mina Loy's Songs to Joannes; Part III. Psychologies: 5. Treating trauma, modernizing narrative: Bernard Hart's The Psychology of Insanity and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier; 6. 'Mental Cases': forms of shellshock in William Brown's Psychology and Psychotherapy and Poems by Wilfred Owen; Conclusion.

'Peppis brings … close reading skills to ten early modernist texts … to show that literature and science, rather than being antithetical 'discourses' were subtly collaborative in the engineering of high modernism's 'black boxes'.' The Times Literary Supplement