Novel Atmospheres

Air, Affect, and Literary Modernism

How modernist novels learned to think through air, mood, and environment.

Modernist literature is often associated with interiority and psychological depth. Novel Atmospheres turns this account inside out, asking readers to look up and out into the air. Anna Jones Abramson shows that in the twentieth century, dramatic changes in the air changed the novel itself.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, a series of technological innovations transformed the relationship between humans and the atmosphere: poison gas, airplanes, air conditioning, radio waves, and air raids made atmosphere palpable and sometimes lethal in entirely new ways while innovations in physics and weather forecasting transformed the legibility of the sky. At the same time, modernist writers seized on the aesthetic sense of atmosphere as they experimented with formal strategies for building a new