Machines for Living

Changes in the routines of domestic life were among the most striking social phenomena of the period between the two World Wars, when the home came into focus as a problem to be solved: re-imagined, streamlined, electrified, and generally cleaned up. Modernist writers understood themselves to be living in an epochal moment when the design and meaning of home life were reconceived. Moving among literature, architecture, design, science, and technology, Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standardization, scientific method, functionalism, efficiency science, and others, that form the basis of literary modernism and stand at the confluence of modernism and modernity. Even as modernist writers criticized the expanding reach of modernization into the home, they drew on its conceptual vocabulary to develop both the thematic and formal commitments of literary modernism. Rosner's work develops a new methodology for interdisciplinary modernist studies and shows how the reinvention of domestic life is central to modernist literature.

Victoria Rosner is Dean of the New York University Gallatin School and Professor of Humanities and English. Rosner is the author of Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2005), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group ( 2014) and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (2012; with Geraldine Pratt). She is co-editor of the Gender and Culture series, published by Columbia University Press, as well as founding co-editor of the web-based archive Pioneering Women of American Architecture, a project that recovers the histories of US women architects born before 1940.

- 1: Introduction: Machine Age Homes - 2: Minimum Writing - 3: "Fear in a Handful of Dust:" Modernism and Germ Theory - 4: "Regular Hours and Regular Ideas:" Originality in the Age of Standardization - 5: Modernism's Missing Children: Mass Production and Human Reproduction - 6: The House that Virginia Woolf Built (and Rebuilt)