Affective Materialities reads modernist literature for the ways in which bodies come to matter physically, socially, and juridically using two recent turns in literary studies—one to affect studies and the other to ecocriticism. Each chapter in the collection delves into a multifold body, investigating how body-forms come to matter. Chapters reveal what the modernist body represents in a way that also addresses the most urgent contemporary concerns of modernity today. In other words, chapters address how a body signifies, becomes legible, writes, is written, touches, constitutes, merges, and e ... More

Affective Materialities reads modernist literature for the ways in which bodies come to matter physically, socially, and juridically using two recent turns in literary studies—one to affect studies and the other to ecocriticism. Each chapter in the collection delves into a multifold body, investigating how body-forms come to matter. Chapters reveal what the modernist body represents in a way that also addresses the most urgent contemporary concerns of modernity today. In other words, chapters address how a body signifies, becomes legible, writes, is written, touches, constitutes, merges, and encounters through various representations in a peculiarly modernist fashion. In turn, the collection sets the stakes for how bodies merge with their surroundings or are re-created by them, into an amalgam of self and place, as ethical concern for social justice. We aim to address the way the body and animate matter become a lens for grasping the fluidities of race, gender, sexuality, anthropocentrism, individualism, and ultimately, the promise and limits of creativity itself.