Modernist Physics studies literary texts and scientific ideas in their historical context to provide an original account of the ways in which Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence engaged with the scientific theories, especially those of Albert Einstein.

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

This study argues that both science and literature operate out of comparable impulses in their consideration of the nature of truth and the perception of reality. It focuses on central scientific paradigms as they appear in the aesthetics of the French new novel, both to contrast the Newtonian mechanistic, deterministic world-view characteristic of much of nineteenth-century thought with the dominant interest of the twentieth century in indeterminancy, illogic, paradox, and entropy. It describes the new novel as a subjective, probabilistic entity, a new Gestalt/ontological event in which the «re-presentation» of reality becomes a nonabsolute time/space experience occurring simultaneously with the act of reading.

Book 4: Faith, Reason, And Power In The Early Modern World - Book 5: Romanticism, Realism, And The Nineteenth-Century World--Book 6: Modernism, Globalism, And The Information Age.

A fascinating interdisciplinary study, explaining the development of modern art from the 1790s until today.