Modernism/modernity

New conceptions of space and time, urbanization and industrialization, the steam engine and the automobile, the wireless and the telegram, Britain's decline as an imperial power, the World Wars—these are all familiar frameworks for our readings of British modernism. By contrast, Megan Faragher's Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn explores a refreshing set of contexts and archives that cohere around the emergence and institutionalization of what she calls the "psychographic turn"—"the study of a mass-mindset through the manifestation of psychological interiority as a form of data"—and its corresponding research technology, the public opinion poll (11). Faragher's genealogy of psychography begins in the late nineteenth century, when social psychology was an emerging pseudo-science seeking to "make interiority legible" through mind-reading, hypnosis, and necromancy, and closes with the consolidation of psychographics across the spheres of academia, government, and mass media after 1945 (50). As she demonstrates, the rapid growth of social psychology and sociology as authoritative sciences and the rise of polling as a mode of collective self-reflection became a concern for canonical figures like H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen as well as genre fiction writers such as Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Naomi Mitchison, and Celia Fremlin. Each of these writers, Faragher argues, thematizes major tensions around the perceived promise and threat of polling, addressing its dissemination with "equal parts hope and dread" (20). Each chapter traces this ambivalence by attending to anxieties about democratic participation and authoritarian control, polling data as impartial knowledge or political propaganda, the self rendered as individual subject or calculable object, and the survey as a gendered site pitting qualitative self-expression against the quantitative erasure of voice. [End Page 388]

Faragher situates these tensions in relation to more conventional accounts of the transition from "high" to "late" modernism by reconsidering the relationship between the "institutional conception of interiority and the inscrutability of the psychological other" that her objects interrogate. Indeed, one of her monograph's key contributions is to complicate our tendency to characterize modernist literature by its engagement with the mysteries of individual interiority, or as Faragher aptly puts it, with "theorizing the opaque realm of the psyche" conceived as "resistant to systematization" (213, 12). Rather, Faragher contends that British literature of the 1930s and 1940s urgently wrestled with "views of the individual as objective, quantifiable, and representable" (14). Another major virtue of the book is that it represents a timely addition to research focusing on the entwined history of literary production, the advent of the social sciences, and the expansion of mass culture. From the digital humanities to other "sociologies of literature"—approaches skeptical of the utility of close reading and the association of literature with emotion, subjectivity, and authenticity—scholars have recently tuned into the extent and ways in which humanistic interpretive modes can benefit from a more rigorous understanding of the development and methodologies of more scientistic ones.

Public Opinion Polling's range of archives and texts and its varied cast of characters are among its most striking features. The book impressively spans multiple spheres of culture and media formats—from the novel to the newspaper, radio and film, political pamphlets and personal letters, fieldwork journals and organizational squabbles—and unearths connections between previously unassociated actors. Moving between the registers of history, aesthetics, and abstract ideas to assemble recognizable and untold fragments of the psychographic turn into an original narrative, Faragher's architecture might be seen as informed by the act of surveying itself. For instance, the first chapter's assessment of the "sociological aesthetics" of H. G. Wells includes: attention to his debates with figures responsible for "transforming group psychology into a formal scientific pursuit," such as Gustave Le Bon; details like Wells's desire for a chair in sociology at the University of London; and interpretations of his late fiction and forays into film (27, 24). Faragher demonstrates how...