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OverviewFew modern materials have been as central to histories of environmental toxicity, medical ignorance, and legal liability as asbestos. A naturally occurring mineral fibre once hailed for its ability to guard against fire, asbestos is now best known for the horrific illnesses it causes. This book offers a new take on the established history of asbestos from a literary critical perspective, showing how literature and film during and after modernism responded first to the material's proliferation through the built environment, and then to its catastrophic effects on human health. Starting from the surprising encounters writers have had with asbestos Franz Kafka's part ownership of an asbestos factory, Primo Levi's work in an asbestos mine, and James Kelman's early life as an asbestos factory worker the book looks to literature to rethink received truths in historical, legal and medical scholarship. In doing so, it models an interdisciplinary approach for tracking material intersections between modernism and the environmental and health humanities. Asbestos The Last Modernist Object offers readers a compelling new method for using cultural objects when thinking about how to live with the legacies of toxic materials. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Arthur RosePublisher: Edinburgh University Press Imprint: Edinburgh University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 23.40cm Weight: 0.386kg ISBN: 9781474482431ISBN 10: 1474482430 Pages: 256 Publication Date: 31 May 2024 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsFramed around the global history of asbestos, Rose uses literary texts, tropes, characters and creators to deepen our understanding of a culture of asbestos in new and often surprising ways. Rose's multidisciplinary approach shows how deeply culturally-embedded the mineral was - and remains - through his sophisticated and innovative scholarship. --Jessica van Horssen, Leeds Beckett University This surprising and original history of asbestos offers a compelling investigation of the material as a modernist object. The book shows us what literary criticism can do differently in attending to material life, giving us accounts of various historical, literary, and biographical accounts of literary figures' encounters with asbestos, but also a reckoning with a family history of South African asbestos mining. [...] Rose shows how paying extraordinarily minute literary critical attention to one single material - its history, its associations, its rich potential for narrative - can cast light on swathes of cultural history; Asbestos - The Last Modernist Object offers a fascinating movement between medical, personal and literary spaces.--MSA Book Prize Author InformationArthur Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (Bloomsbury, 2017), and a co-editor of Theories of History (Bloomsbury 2018) and Reading Breath in Literature (Palgrave 2019). Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |