Modernism and the culture of efficiency : ideology and fiction / Evelyn Cobley.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Cobley's close readings of modernist British fiction by writers as diverse as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Conrad, and E.M. Forster identify characters whose attitudes and behaviour patterns indirectly manifest cultural anxieties that can be traced to the conflicted logic of efficiency.

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CHOICE Review

This densely written study traces the early-20th-century's fixation on increasing efficiency in industrial and community arrangements to F. W. Taylor's labor-management principles and Henry Ford's assembly-line techniques. The principles that produced the unintended consequences of their influence are held responsible for the dispiriting social engineering that created modern suburbs and--a more extreme example--the organized mass murder at Auschwitz. Cobley (Univ. of Victoria, Canada) takes this up in the first part of the book, then devotes the second half to an exploration of how selected modern novels--Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, E. M. Forster's Howards End, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World--have depicted increased efficiency and given it priority over humane values. Huxley's dystopia is the most obvious example of social control going awry, in this case under the direction of World Controller Mustapha Mond, said to be based on H. G. Wells and industrialist Sir Alfred Mond. Subtler readings of the other novels identify less extreme negative examples of social regulation, either depicted or advocated. References to existing scholarship and an impressive bibliography establish the author's credentials for treating this central theme in modern Anglo-American literature. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. M. S. Vogeler emerita, California State University, Fullerton