Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquitousness of the human face. Its conflicting dynamics of legibility and opacity fascinated Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and, later, Kōbō Abe, who framed their literary projects around the question of the face as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, difference and combinations thereof. Modernism – it could be argued – rewrote the face. In the present day, recent developments such as mask wearing during the pandemic and the use of facial recognition technology during the Black Lives Matter protests have forced us to reflect on the social impact of obscuring faces, while also raising concerns about about the visibility of certain faces and how this might be abused. This book builds an arc between these recent conversations about the politics of the face and those physiognomic discourses that reflect modernism's long, complex and fascinating cultural history. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

‘Face and Form reassesses the centrality of physiognomy in the modernist perception to ask what we can learn from it today. This book is a remarkable contribution to modernist studies, and a timely response to the ongoing debates on facial recognition technologies and the politics of COVID-19.'

Katja Haustein - Lecturer in Comparative Literature, University of Kent

‘Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism is an engaging, lucidly written account of the face as the site of a modernist struggle over form. Parvulescu offers brilliant re-readings of canonical modernist texts that focus on “modernist faciality” in light of their well-known experiments with character and literary form.'

Rochelle Rives - Professor of English, City University of New York