Victoria Rosner is a leading feminist scholar who specializes in modernist literature and is an advocate of cross-disciplinary scholarship in relation to different forms of cultural production. Her latest book, Machines for Living, is a study of modernist literature and domestic life, especially “the modernization of the early twentieth-century home” (1), considered through links between literature and two broader fields of scholarship, namely, architecture and design, and science and technology. Rosner’s focus is English modernist literature, with some U.S. writers added to the mix. Her engagement with architecture and design also includes some continental European ideas and examples. Through case studies of a relatively small number of authors and literary texts, Rosner considers concepts and issues such as rationalism, functionalism, hygiene, efficiency studies, standardization, uniformity, modularity, and mass production (considerations familiar to many readers of this journal). Although she often refers to the period covered in the book as...

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