Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter offers a brief recapitulation of what has been learnt by approaching British and other literatures of the period 1850 to 1950 from the perspective of the ideas of signal and interface. It concludes that, while the pressure these ideas exerted did indeed remain constant throughout the period, it took an eccentric emphasis on aspects of form to reconfigure the text itself as a manipulation of signal-to-noise ratio. The ‘modernism’ which took shape in works by Lewis, Loy, and Mirrlees was a specialist affair. The chapter concludes with two further case studies. The first has to do with the function of a particular architectural feature—the corridor—in nineteenth-century British poetry and fiction; the second with the hugely influential theory and practice of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who thought that political solidarity was best expressed by means of what we would now term ‘social media’.