Modernism and Cosmology ― Absurd Lights

In Modernism and Cosmology, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett are examined as test cases for modernist aesthetic responses to a new cosmology. Katherine Ebury teases out the reception of Einstein's cosmology in modernist literary culture, both locally and globally. Detailed close readings of the key works of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett are used to develop alternative reading models of texts such as Finnegans Wake and 'The Trilogy'; within these texts we find multiple references to binary stars, nebulae, the Big Bang Theory, the space-time continuum and the Expanding Universe and many other key concepts of the 'mysterious universe' of the new physics, providing insights into their difficulty, absurdity and beauty. Careful attention to contemporary popularisations allows us to achieve a measure of the intellectual toolbox with which these modernist writers equipped themselves and to understand their creative transformations of this material.

Katherine Ebury is a Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her reviews and articles have appeared in Joyce Studies Annual, Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/Modernity, James Joyce Quarterly and Journal of Literature and Science.