Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31
Oct 2019 · Oxford University Press
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This study provides the first substantial history and analysis of the To-Day and To-Morrow series of 110 books, published by Kegan Paul Trench and Trübner (and E. P. Dutton in the USA) from 1923 to 1931, in which writers chose a topic, described its present, and predicted its future. Contributors included J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh MacDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, André Maurois, and many others. The study combines a comprehensive account of its interest, history, and range with a discussion of its key concerns, tropes, and influence. The argument focuses on science and technology, not only as the subject of many of the volumes, but also as method--especially through the paradigm of the human sciences--applied to other disciplines; and as a source of metaphors for representing other domains. It also includes chapters on war, technology, cultural studies, and literature and the arts. This book aims to reinstate the series as a vital contribution to the writing of modernity, and to reappraise modernism's relation to the future, establishing a body of progressive writing which moves beyond the discourses of post-Darwinian degeneration and post-war disenchantment, projecting human futures rather than mythic or classical pasts. It also shows how, as a co-ordinated body of futurological writing, the series is also revealing about the nature and practices of modern futurology itself.
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About the author
Max Saunders became Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham in 2019. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1996); and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press 2010). He has edited five volumes of Ford's writing, including an annotated critical edition of Some Do Not...(Carcanet, 2010), and has published essays on Life-writing, on Impressionism, and on a number of modern writers. As Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King's College London, he directed the College's Arts and Humanities Research Institute from 2012-18. He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to research his latest book, Imagined Futures (Oxford University Press, 2019).
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