About the Author

Laura Marcus is one of the leading literary critics of modernist literature and culture.

Book Overview

Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema covers the period from around 1880 to 1930, when modernity as a form of social and cultural life fed into the beginnings of modernism as a cultural form.

Key Subjects Explored

Railways, cinema, psychoanalysis and the literature of detection - and their impact on modern sensibility - are four of the chief subjects explored.

Focus on Women Writers

Marcus also stresses the creativity of modernist women writers, including H. D., Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.

Themes and Significance

The overriding themes of this work bear on the understanding of the early twentieth century as a transitional age, thus raising the question of how the moderns understood the conditions of their own modernity.