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Introduction: Technicity and the American Techno-City

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Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies

Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ((MPCC))

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Abstract

New York was proclaimed as the preeminent technological city of the early twentieth century and witnessed the growth of the distinctive commercialized leisure and popular cultures of the period. Across the early years of the century quotidian and contingent amusements were transformed into lucrative urban leisure machines with the growth of huge-capacity dance halls, luxurious cinemas, amusements parks and vast department stores. This chapter explores New York and its technologies, considering the relationship between leisure and the machines of the city. It also explores theories of technicity and the posthuman, and the relationship between poetry, gender, modernism and technology, concluding with exploratory considerations of the poetry of Marianne Moore, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Kathleen Tankersely Young. In analyzing representations of the city, the self and the technological in these women poets the chapter begins the process of gendering modernist technology studies that unfolds through this book.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Modern Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    Alex Goody

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Goody, A. (2019). Introduction: Technicity and the American Techno-City. In: Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95961-7_1

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