The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities that had its roots in the Enlightenment but reached its full flowering with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in the crisis of individuality that is generated by the nexus of science, literature, and politics, one that challenges each of us to find a way of balancing our personal identities between our public and private selves in an otherwise estranging world. This challenge, which can only be expressed as "the struggle of modernity," perhaps finds no better expression than in C. P. Snow. In his career as novelist, scientist, and civil servant, C. P. Snow (1905-1980) attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of modern science and the humanities. While Snow is often regarded as a late-Victorian liberal who has little to say about the modernist period in which he lived and wrote, de la Mothe challenges this judgment, reassessing Snow's place in twentieth-century thought. He argues that Snow's life and writings—most notably his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels and his provocative thesis in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution—reflect a persistent struggle with the nature of modernity. They manifest Snow's belief that science and technology were at the center of modern life.

Novelist and cultural commentator C.P. Snow was a large and controversial presence in his lifetime but his work has been largely neglected since his death in 1980. This is the first 21st-century book to offer a clear, informed and sympathetic survey of all his novels and major non-fiction books and to affirm their importance for the world today.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science is a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as 'Science and culture'.

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

Novels bring us into fictional worlds where we encounter the lives, struggles, and dreams of characters who speak to the underlying pulse of society and social change. In this book, post–World War II America comes alive again as literary critic Robert McParland tilts the rearview mirror to see the characters that captured the imaginations of millions of readers in the most popular and influential novels of the 1950s. This literary era introduced us to Holden Caulfield, Augie March, Lolita, and other antiheroes. Together with popular culture heroes such as Perry Mason and James Bond, they entertained thousands of readers while revealing the underlying currents of ambition, desire, and concern that were central to the American Dream. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’sRoom explored racial issues and matters of identity that reverberate still today. The works of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and the clever and creative William S. Burroughs and his Naked Lunch challenged conventional perspectives. The People We Meet in Stories will appeal to readers discovering these works for the first time and to those whose tattered paperbacks reveal a long relationship with these key works in American literary history.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We live in a moment of high anxiety around digital transformation. Computers are blamed for generating toxic forms of culture and ways of life. Once part of future imaginaries that were optimistic or even utopian, today there is a sense that things have turned out very differently. Anti-computing is widespread. This book seeks to understand its cultural and material logics, its forms, and its operations. Anti-Computing critically investigates forgotten histories of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It asks why dissent is forgotten and how - under what circumstances - it revives. Constituting an engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and working through a series of case studies, this book is compelling reading for scholars in digital media, literary, cultural history, digital humanities and associated fields at all levels.