With his customary wit and erudition, one of America’s most celebrated and distinguished critics examines the response of literary Modernism to environmental changes caused by technology.

Focusing on Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, Hugh Kenner explores how inventions as various as the linotype, the typewriter, the subway, and the computer altered the way these writers viewed and depicted the world. Whether discussing Joyce’s acute awareness of the nuances of typesetting or Beckett’s experiments with a proto-computer-language, Kenner consistently approaches the works of these authors from fresh angles and offers a wealth of anecdotes and asides that will delight both the general reader and the literary specialist.