The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface, 1850-1950

294 Pages·1.835 MB·English

by  David Trotter

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/03/20, SPi
The Literature of Connection
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/03/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/03/20, SPi
The Literature of
Connection
Signal, Medium, Interface, 1850–1950
DAVID TROTTER
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/03/20, SPi
1
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© David Trotter 2020
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First Edition published in 2020
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Acknowledgements
This book is mostly my own fault. Productive exchanges with the following have,
however, significantly improved it: Edward Allen, Kasia Boddy, Beci Carver,
Steven Connor, Andrew Francis, Heather Glen, David Kastan, Gerri Kimber,
Michael Levenson, Leo Mellor, Sean Pryor, John Durham Peters, James Purdon,
Joseph Rosenberg, Bernhard Siegert, and Garrett Stewart. I am very grateful to
each of them individually, and also to Jacqueline Norton, at Oxford University
Press, and to the Press’s two anonymous readers.
Quotation from the following works is by permission of the author’s estate/
trust and Carcanet Press Limited:
H.D., Trilogy, with a Foreword by Norman Holmes Pearson (Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 1997).
Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 1997).
Hope Mirrlees, Collected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet
Press, 2011).
One part of Chapter 5 was first delivered as the 8th Katherine Mansfield
Society Birthday Lecture on 14 October 2017: The Yellow Mackintosh: Sights,
Sounds, and Smells in the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Gerri Kimber (Bath:
Katherine Mansfield Society Publications, 2017); another derives from
‘Modernism Reloaded: The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield’, Affirmations: of the
modern, 1.1 (2013), 21–43.
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/03/20, SPi
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction 1
PART I. BRITISH LITERATURE: VICTORIAN
TO MODERNIST
1. The Telegraphic Principle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21
2. The Interface as Cultural Form: Conrad’s Sea Captains 53
3. After Electromagnetism 85
4. Starry Sky: Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy 110
5. Giving the Sign: Katherine Mansfield’s Stories 133
PART II. CASE STUDIES
6. Kafka’s Strindberg 163
7. Women Spies 189
8. Flying Africans, Black Pilots 215
Conclusion 235
Endnotes 247
Index 279
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List of Illustrations
6.1. August Strindberg, The White Mare II (1892). Oil on paperboard.
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. 177
7.1. Telecommunications hub. Frame grab from Death at Broadcasting House
(1934, Phoenix Films, prod. Hugh Perceval, dir. Reginald Denham). 200
7.2. Listening, and counting. Frame grab from The Lady Vanishes (1938,
Gainsborough Pictures, prod. Edward Black, dir. Alfred Hitchcock). 205
7.3. The pattern on the dress aligned with the pattern on a map. Frame grab from
Dark Journey (1937, London Film Productions, prod. and dir. Victor Saville). 210
7.4. ‘I even started knitting in Morse . . . ’. Frame grab from Now It Can Be Told
(1944, RAF Film Unit). 213
7.5. Message received. Frame grab from Against the Wind (1948, Ealing Studios,
prod. Michael Balcon, dir. Charles Crichton). 214
8.1. Automatic pilot. Frame grab from The Flying Ace (1926, Norman Studios,
prod. and dir. Richard E. Norman). 216