Imagined futures writing, science, and modernity in the To-day and To-morrow book series, 1923-31 / Max Saunders.

Author/creator Saunders, Max
Other author Oxford University Press.
Format Electronic
EditionFirst edition.
Publication InfoOxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2019.
Descriptionix, 423 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Supplemental ContentFull text available from Oxford Scholarship Online
Subjects

Summary This study provides the first substantial history and analysis of the To-Day and To-Morrow series of 110 books, published by Kegan Paul Trench and Trubner (and E. P. Dutton in the USA) from 1923 to 1931, in which writers chose a topic, described its present, and predicted its future. Contributors included J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh McDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, Andre Maurois, and many others. The study combines a comprehensive account of its interest, history, and range with a discussion of its key concerns, tropes, and influence. 0The argument focuses on science and technology, not only as the subject of many of the volumes, but also as method-especially through the paradigm of the human sciences-applied to other disciplines; and as a source of metaphors for representing other domains. It also includes chapters on war, technology, cultural studies, and literature and the arts.0This book aims to reinstate the series as a vital contribution to the writing of modernity, and to reappraise modernism's relation to the future, establishing a body of progressive writing which moves beyond the discourses of post-Darwinian degeneration and post-war disenchantment, projecting human futures rather than mythic or classical pasts. It also shows how, as a co-ordinated body of futurological writing, the series is also revealing about the nature and practices of modern futurology itself.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references (pages [399]-413) and index.
Access restrictionAvailable only to authorized users.
Technical detailsMode of access: World Wide Web
Genre/formElectronic books.
LCCN 2019937073
ISBN9780198829454 (hardback)
ISBN0198829450 (hardback)

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