Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, national governments and writers of fiction alike began to take an interest in information not simply as fact, nor yet as effortlessly transmissible data, but as an unusual and destabilizing new phenomenon.
Modernist Informatics mines this burgeoning bureaucracy and marshals an array of archival evidence to detail the varied reactions of writers struggling in their lives and works to make sense of this strange new age of information.
As James Purdon recounts in this fascinating study, many people, including Joseph Conrad and Walter Benjamin, felt the presence of information as an interruption rather than an enhancement of meaningful communication. Its intrusion provoked strong reactions from novelists such as Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, and Graham Greene. Each regarded the prying eyes of information society with increasing unease, as they struggled to overcome the division of daily existence between a fixed entity on a ledger and the imaginative possibility of everyday life. For others, such as Elizabeth Bowen, the nascent information age offered new opportunities for transforming experience into prose. Relating these varied, complex reactions and how they found their way into fiction, Purdon shows how historical changes shaped the narratives at his study's core and gave birth to a range of new informatic phenomena: passports and identity papers; the dossiers of the Mass-Observation movement; the literal and figurative blackout procedures of the Blitz; and the government-sponsored "information films" of John Grierson.
Modernist Informatics ingeniously traces how information culture seeped into everyday lives, forging a relationship of entanglement as well as antagonism-a tension that was central to the shaping of modernity.
Industry Reviews
"This stylish study describes how experimental narrative forms registered the transformations and encroachments of a proliferating body of state-managed knowledge in Britain across the first half of the century. Historically meticulous, critically agile, and written with energy and flair, Modernist Informatics offers an altogether original account of modernism's civic engagements." --Marina MacKay, author of Modernism and World War II
"Modernist Informatics shows how questions about the control and spread of information shaped the British cultural imaginary from the turn of the century to the Second World War. Purdon's lucid and timely study places fiction, documentary film, and the Mass-Observation movement alongside state policy and wartime censorship in their urgent concern with 'the government of information.'" --Richard Menke, author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian
Fiction and Other Information Systems
"Modernist Informatics shows James Purdon to be one of the most exciting scholars to have emerged in the field of modernist studies in recent years. The book offers splendid new insights into how the mediation and governance of information was addressed in a wide range of works by major and lesser-known writers in the first half of the twentieth century." --Alex Houen, author of Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran
Carson
"This is an original, expertly researched, imaginatively brilliant book, tracking information paranoia in modernist and wartime writing. The book explores the growth of a data/surveillance culture processing subjects into dossiers, informational grids, postal addresses, files and connecting Victorian systematizing of population with the IT revolution of the 1940s and 1950s by sketching forth the missing middle, the sudden expansion of classificatory procedures
into modes of state biopower." --Adam Piette, author of The Literary Cold War, 1945-Vietnam
"James Purdon's luminous, searching study shows how the information age had its beginning not in our digital world but in the historical interval between steam and cybernetics. He seems to have read everything written in this period, and Modernist Informatics deftly shows how information moved pervasively but often undetected between public and private domains. Tenaciously charting the intimate, intricate media ecology of official documents and weaving
together themes of secrecy, ciphering, sorting, copying, monitoring, interception, and forgery, Purdon shows brilliantly how informatic processes coalesce with the formal and narrative devices of several
canonical authors, the auto-anthropology of Mass-Observation, and the documentary cinema of John Grierson. An arrestingly new understanding of modernism emerges from alert and supple analyses provided in Modernist Informatics." --Steven Connor, author of Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
