DAVID TROTTER. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars.

Abstract

David Trotter’s engaging book explores British literature of the period 1927–1939, addressing in unprecedented detail modernity’s new technologies and, particularly interesting, the new materials they depended upon. Historical in approach, the chosen period is striking. Looking past the more familiar candidates for the title, this first media age is not—and is not defined against—the boom in printed matter in the fifteenth century, the development of newspapers in the eighteenth, or the electrical telegraphy revolution of the nineteenth. This, then, is a modernist’s version of modernity, where the sheer proliferation of new media is more significant than any single invention. And yet Trotter makes a pointed comment by choosing to begin after those favoured representative years of modernism, most prominently 1913 and 1922. The belatedness of the British literary response to technological developments is a central pillar of the work. Following William Uricchio, he opens a fertile space between new technologies and the rituals, values, behaviours and narratives that accrue around them, the latter differentiating technologies from media. It is, then, the result of the integration of these devices within a broader literary culture that is of interest, hence Trotter’s claim for ‘the sheer intelligence of the inquiries they variously undertake into the technological mediation of experience’ (p. 1). This is a far more persuasive argument than simple chronological coincidence, although because of the sheer volume of the works mentioned, there is noticeable variation in their quality.