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Publications – Tim Armstrong

Books

1998 Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study

(Cambridge University Press)

A study of ‘surgical’ modernism, focusing on moments in which modernist writers intervene in bodily processes, and on ideas of the ‘prosthetic’ text. Topics discussed include: Fletcherism, early gender-surgery, rejuvenation operations, bodily electrification and the electric chair, the coming of sound film, automatic writing, theories of ‘distraction’. Writers covered include: Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Theodore Dreiser, Nathaniel West; psychologists Freud, B. F. Skinner, Hugo Münsterberg, June Downey and others.

Part of chapter 2 is reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land; chapter 3 is reprinted in Modernism: Critical Contexts, ed. Tim Middleton.

2000 Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Palgrave)

A study of Hardy’s haunting, considered in terms of history, intertextuality, the psyche, and the biographical narratives which have been attached to him. It includes discussion of the phantasm of the ‘lost child’ which pervades his texts (reproduced in Lois Deacon’s claims in the late 1960s that she had discovered Hardy’s ‘bastard’ via clues in the poetry); the notion of intertextual haunting via the work of Abraham and Torok; and of what I call the ‘politics of the dead’, that is the status of the dead in the vision of history as phantasmagoria which he inherits from Burke and Carlyle. Topics covered under this heading include the Titanic disaster and Zionism. A final chapter considers haunting, rhetoric and intertextuality in Hardy’s love poetry, looking at the epigraph of ‘Poems of 1912-13’, Dante, and his relation to Victorian women poets.

Click here for a sample chapter

2005 Modernism (Polity)

Modernism: A Cultural History explores modernism’s struggle with a split temporality in which old and the emerging new struggle, and in which, with the e Great War, notions of a traumatic or ‘frozen’ time emerge. It considers such topics as modernism, market culture and obscurity; the culture of science and technology; politics, economics, eugenics, and sexology; primitivism and race; cinema and sound recording; gender and modernism; and the study of consciousness and the senses. It portrays modernism less as a movement in revolt from the modern world than as attempting to engage with that world –the cry of ‘reform!’ is used to describe modernist writers’ engagement with politics or bodies as well as with inherited style. A parade of writers – from the canonical like Pound, Eliot and Woolf to less well-figures like Mary Butts, Muriel Rukeyser and Sterling Brown – are considered.

Edited collections and editions

1993 (ed.) Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

(Longmans Annotated Texts, 385pp)

This edition includes a 44 page critical introduction which aims at a reassessment of Hardy’s poetry, as well as extensive annotations, metrical notes, notes on further reading, bibliography and other material. It arranges poems as they were ordered in Hardy’s individual volumes, and prints the ‘Poems of 1912-13’ in their entirety.
You can read the introduction here (pdf).

1994 (co-ed.) Beyond the Pleasure Dome: writing and
addiction from the Romantics (Sheffield Academic Press)
Edited with Matthew Campbell and Sue Vice

Collection of interdisciplinary essays on the literature and culture of addiction, drug use, drinking, addictive reading, consumption, law, and other issues. Based on a 1991 conference at the University of Sheffield.

1996 (ed.) American Bodies (New York University Press/
Sheffield Academic Press)

Edited collection of essays on issues in American culture relating to the representation and treatment of the body from c.1800 to the 1990s, on topics ranging from maritime tattoos and cannibalism to neurasthenia and modernism; from the dietary regime of Fletcherism to the hyper-masculine postmodern body.

2001 Guest editor, ‘Literature and Technology’ special
issue, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 37:2

Essays by James Annesley, Sara Danius, Garin Dowd, Sam Halliday, Laura Marcus, Pamela Thurschwell, Barbara Will, Tim Armstrong, focusing on the issue of technology in and in relation to literature from telegraphy and typewriting in the late-Victorian period to the development of the internet and its prophets in the 1990s.

Contents of issue

2008 Guest Editor, ‘Nuclear Stories: Cold War Literatures’
issue of Cultural Politics 4:3

Essays by Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Andrew Gibson, Adam Piette,
David Humphrey, Daniel Cordle, Alex Houen, Steven Morrison

Contents of issue

Articles and parts of books

1985 ‘An Old Philosopher in Rome: George Santayana and His Visitors.’ Journal of American Studies, 19 (1985), 349-68.

1987 ‘“A Good Word for Winter”: The Poetics of a Season.’ New England Quarterly, 60 (1987), 568-83. [On nineteenth-century American literature]

1988 ‘Stevens’s “Last Poem” Again.’ Wallace Stevens Journal, 12 (1988), 35-43.

1988 ‘Supplementarity: Poetry as the After-life of Thomas Hardy.’ Victorian Poetry (1988), 381-93.

1988 ‘The Latent and the Patent: Hardy and the Subjectivity of Old Age.’ Criticism, 30 (1988), 455-66.

1990 ‘Tintern Abbey’, Stet (literary broadsheet, Ireland) 3, Oct. 1990.

1990 ‘Final Gestures.’ Modern Language Quarterly, 49:4, 362-77. [On Whitman and others]

1991 ‘Giving Birth to Yourself: Yeats’s Late Sexuality.’ Yeats Annual, 8 39-58.

1991 ‘Hardy’s Dantean Purples.’ Thomas Hardy Journal, 7:2 (1991), 47-55.

1991 ‘The Electrification of the Body at the Turn of the Century.’ Textual Practice, Autumn 1991, 303-25.

1992 ‘Hardy, Thaxter, and History as Coincidence in ‘The Convergence of the Twain.’’ Victorian Poetry, 30 (1992), 29-42.

1994 ‘Electricity and the Commodity,’ in Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics, ed. Vice, Campbell & Armstrong (Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), pp.130-42.

1995 ‘Open and Closed Fields: American Modernism and the Landscape.’ In Modern American Landscapes, ed. Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), pp.129-50.

1995 ‘Muting the Klaxon: Poetry, History, and Irish Modernism,’ in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davies (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp.43-74. text of article (pdf)

1996 ‘Reforming the Corpus: Henry James and Fletcherism,’ in American Bodies, ed. Tim Armstrong (New York University Press/Sheffield Academic Press), pp.101-118.

1996 Introduction to American Bodies (see above), pp.9-16.

1997 ‘A Child is Being Beaten: Fantasy and Violence in Once Were Warriors’, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature 45 (1997), 58-72. Reprinted in BRONZS: British Review of N.Z. Studies 9 (1997), 71-82. text of article

1997 ‘Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas’, ABES (Annotated Bibliography of English Studies), vol. 310, English Twentieth-Century Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1997). Over 100 annotated entries on books and articles on Hardy and Thomas, total c.25,000 words.

1999 ‘Hardy, Zionism, and Providential History’, Thomas Hardy Journal 15:3 (1991): 73-79.

2000 ‘Winter Words’, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 473-77.

2000 ‘Two Types of Shock in Modernity’. Critical Quarterly 42:1 (2000): 60-73.
text of article (pdf)

2000 ‘Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-13”’. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, ed. Neil Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 359-68. text of article (pdf)

2000 ‘Poetry and Science’. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, ed. Neil Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 76-88.

2001 ‘Introduction,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 37:2 (special issue on ‘Literature and Technology’).

2001 ‘Len Lye and Laura Riding in the 1930s: The Impossibility of Film and Literature,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 37:2, 176-85.

2002 ‘The Delay of the Machine Age’, in Homo Orthopedicus, ed. Nathalie Roelens and Wanda Strauven (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 23-43.

2003 ‘Modernism and Technology’, A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 158-78.

2003 ‘Len Lye and Laura Riding in the 1930s: The Impossibility of Film and Literature,’ Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing After Cinema, ed. Julian Murphet & Lydia Rainford (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003), 125-36. [expanded version of 2001 article]

2004 ‘Slavery, Insurance and Sacrifice in the Black Atlantic’, Oceans and Voyages, ed. Bernhard Klein Klein and Gesa Mackenthun (New York: Routledge, 2003), 167-85.
text of article (pdf)

2004 ‘Hardy, History, and Music’, in Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, ed. Tim Dolin (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan), 153-66. text of article (pdf)

2005 ‘The 1970s and the Culture of Culture’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

2007* ‘Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic Modernity’, Modernism-Modernity 14:1 (2007): 1-19.

2007 ‘Bodies and Machines’, Tomorrow Now – Rencontre du design et de la science-fiction exhibition catalogue, MUDAM Luxembourg.

2007 ‘Catastrophe and Trauma: A response to Anita Rupprecht, Special Issue on the Zong case, Journal of Legal History, 28:3 (2007): 1-10.

2008 * ‘Introduction: repetition and nostalgia’, ‘Nuclear Stories: Cold War Literatures’ Special Issue of Cultural Politics, 4:3 (2008): 261-68.

2009 ‘Cornell and Loy: Christian Science and the Destruction of the World’. Forthcoming in The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, ed. Rachel Potter. 6,700 words, in press.

2009 ‘The “Mathematical Road”: Sequence and Series in Hardy’s Poetry’, Blackwell Companion to Thomas Hardy, in press (8,000 words, in press).

Review articles and shorter pieces

Over 50 other shorter pieces, review articles and short reviews for London Review of Books, TLS, Textual Practice, Journal of American Studies, Modernism-Modernity, Modern Language Review, Victorian Poetry, American Historical Review, Labor History Review, Yearbook of English Studies, New England Quarterly, Yeats Annual, Thomas Hardy Journal, English Messenger, British Book News, Edinburgh Review, City Limits, Darts, etc.

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