Technology and Irish Modernism

Abstract

This chapter argues that Irish modernism is founded on a broad notion of technology as form and an awareness of the embeddedness of technoscience in the imperial military power that supports British colonial rule. The first wave of Irish modernists, or what are referred to in the chapter as protomodernists, engaged critically with technological forms by the end of the nineteenth century, setting them alongside literary forms and evaluating them as modes of perception, engagement, and mediation. By the height of the European modernist period, Irish modernists would fully acknowledge that technoscientific development was part of a larger network of forms that could not be so easily disentangled from literary form. And all recognised those forms, this chapter argues, as ‘[organising] a situation of moral decision-making’, in the words of Peter-Paul Verbeek.