Cara Lewis

Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism, Cornell University Press, 2020.
  
Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and the study analyzes these (and other) aspects of its intermedial dynamism in a variety of works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein. Positioned at the intersection of new formalist and modernist studies, Dynamic Form seeks both to recast the history of modernist form and to promote a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media. 

“Beholding: Visuality and Postcritical Reading in Ali Smith’s How to be both,” Journal of Modern Literature 42.3 (Spring 2019): 129-50. DOI: 10.2979/jmodelite.42.3.08.

“Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth-Century Literature 60.4 (Winter 2014): 423-54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1001.