Patrick Armstrong

Exploring how modernism registered shock experiences of the microscopic and extended vision in prose fiction through the work of four modernist writers – D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett – this book is the first substantial study of the interrelations between microscopy and modernist fiction. Illustrating ways in which optical instruments had the capacity to change, displace and reframe ideas of what the world is like, this book argues that encounters with the microscopic are often depicted as thresholds between the human and the non-human, in ways that reverberate through modernist fiction. Exploring a period of significant developments in microscopical tools and techniques, from the light microscope to the electron microscope, this book traces a shift that reconfigured the limits of the observable.

Exploring how modernism registered shock experiences of the microscopic and extended vision in prose fiction through the work of four modernist writers – D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett – this book is the first substantial study of the interrelations between microscopy and modernist fiction.Illustrating ways in which optical instruments had the capacity to change, displace and reframe ideas of what the world is like, this book argues that encounters with the microscopic are often depicted as thresholds between the human and the non-human, in ways that reverberate through modernist fiction.Exploring a period of significant developments in microscopical tools and techniques, from the light microscope to the electron microscope, this book traces a shift that reconfigured the limits of the observable.

Brilliant, hard-working, immensely productive and influential, the naturalist Richard Owen was a great promoter of science, and played a large role in shaping London’s Natural History Museum. An often difficult and arrogant individual, he was accused of plagiarism and bullying, and is the only man whom Charles Darwin claimed to hate. Although strongly opposed to Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s theories of evolution through natural selection, there is evidence that a few of Owen’s ideas were not so very distant from theirs. This biography gives an account of Owen’s life and work, providing possible psychological and social reasons for his more controversial characteristics and his sometimes rather strained relations with various scientific contemporaries.