Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OF THE RUSSIAN MARITIME UNION

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-42
Author(s):  
MEDET TECHMURATOVICH JORAEV ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Public Organization ◽  
The Public ◽  
Domestic Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technical Innovations

The article is devoted to the aspects of scientific activity of the Russian Maritime Union. This public organization in the early twentieth century set itself the task of reviving the Russian imperial navy after the defeat in the russo - japanese war of 1904-1905. Meetings of a public organization where scientific problems were discussed are considered. Special attention is paid to the existing rules for publishing a collection of scientific papers by the leaders of the Russian Maritime Union. Information is given on issues related to the colonization of remote areas of Siberia and the Far East. The reasons for the lag of Russian commercial shipping from Western European countries are investigated. The prerequisites for the successful development of German commercial shipbuilding and shipping in the early twentieth century are analyzed. The relationship between the problems of development of Siberian rivers and the unsatisfactory economic condition of remote Russian territories is traced. The history of domestic public organizations and naval affairs in the early twentieth century is studied. In addition, the organization of the Russian maritime union for the promotion of naval knowledge is being considered. The public organization subscribed specialized foreign and domestic literature and created libraries on these issues, open to the public. Then the Russian maritime union attracted such technical innovations as cinematog- raphy and filmstrips to promote naval knowledge among the Russian population.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

scholarly journals Disputing ‘market value’: the Bombay Improvement Trust and the reshaping of a speculative land market in early twentieth-century Bombay

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Shabnum Tejani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Market Value ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Public Purpose ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Future Value ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.

Stealing Words, Transplanting Images

2018 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Yu-jen Liu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Victoria And Albert Museum

Abstract This article explores how the category “Chinese art” was articulated and consolidated in the early twentieth century by focusing on Stephen Bushell's Chinese Art, the first book in English defined in terms of this category. Bushell's monograph highlights the intercultural character of the category, which was transformed in its content and cultural significance, when ostensibly the same authentic knowledge, articulated in verbal and visual representations, was moved from China to Europe and back again. The article starts by examining how Bushell's insider knowledge of Chinese art was transformed to fit the institutional setting of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It then explores how the authoritative knowledge of Chinese art communicated in Bushell's book was appropriated in China by the journal Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 (Journal of National Essence) in the context of attempts to revive national culture. Both cases involved hitherto unnoticed repetitions of text and images. By analyzing the mechanism informing these repetitions, this article reveals the entangled history behind the distinctive articulations of “Chinese art” in Britain and in China. Moreover, the analysis shows how the same elements, whether words or pictures, acquired a substantially different significance as they moved between cultures. This is exemplified by the formulation of the newly emergent classifying category Zhongguo meishupin 中國美術品 (“Chinese art objects”) in Guocui xuebao.

A Brownian Model for Literary Crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Model ◽  
Night And Day

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and British Modernism

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Davison-Pégon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Strategic Marketing ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Mediator

This article examines S. S. Koteliansky as cultural mediator involved not only in the translation of Russian classics, but in strategic marketing ploys and post-revolutionary activism, shaping the cultural attitudes of early twentieth-century London. It starts from his networks in Whitehall, Westminster, and Bloomsbury, before appraising the tactics of enjoining writers to translate and publish the texts he was bringing to Britain. It then turns to the poetics of co-authored translations. Brief extracts from ‘Stavrogin's Confession’, the suppressed chapters of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, translated in 1922 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf, reveal a distinctly modernist attention to voice.

The Reception of Virginia Woolf and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Suzanne Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Student Thesis ◽  
Australian Universities ◽  
Ebb And Flow

This chapter surveys Woolf’s reputation in Australia from the 1920s to the 1970s as it was moulded by colonial cultural politics. The competing influences of cosmopolitanism and nationalism shaped the ebb and flow of Woolf’s reception in Australia during these decades. The rise of the more nationalist Leavisite curriculum in Australian universities from the later 1930s, coupled with ambivalent responses to Woolf’s death in 1941, led to more a more divisive reception of Woolf and modernism in Australia in the mid-century. Australian literary critics Nettie Palmer and Margaret (Margot) Hentze espoused a cosmopolitanism that they found reflected in Woolf’s work, a focus also embraced by Nuri Mass, who, in 1942, submitted the first student thesis on Woolf at University of Sydney. Finally, the chapter examines how three women Australian painters, including Grace Cossington Smith, were influenced by Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox ◽  
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
Claude Cahun

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

Pioneers in Optics: Louis de Broglie and Edwin Herbert Land

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, the long standing argument about whether the character of light was particle-based or wavelike was finally coming to an end as the scientists of the day began to accept that light could assume a dual nature. The possibility that such a duality might apply to matter as well as light was first proposed by physicist Louis de Broglie. Born in Dieppe, France, de Broglie studied in Paris and was descended from members of the French nobility. In his youth, he considered a career as a diplomat but later turned to science and pursued the study of theoretical physics. His brother, Maurice, who had also decided to become a physicist and made many advances in the study of X rays, reportedly had a considerable influence on de Broglie and was the first to introduce him to the work of Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document