In and Out of Sight

"Beestons methodology has all the hallmarks and pleasures of the current trend in literary studies that blends theoretical subtlety—ably moving between the various branches of media and visual studies, as well as feminist theory and theories of modernity—with archival detail. ... This is an exciting debut, one which discloses through its study of the past consequential insights about how we intercept and areintercepted by mediated forms in our present. * Feminist Modernist Studies * Beeston's probing, artful, and original In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen extends and redirects [the] dialogue between modernist literature and visual media. ... In and Out of Sight is a genuinely interdisciplinary project; its author is as conversant in moving-image studies as she is in modernist literary studies. Beeston sustains her range of references through what she identifies as a sort of critical montage, a methodology that poses important questions for the future of modernist studies. ... Beeston encodes her 'strong' combination of theoretical, formalist, and archival rigor within an open—composite, fractured, sutured—reading practice. It is this openness...that is sure to make it durable for generations of future scholars. * Stephen Pasqualina, Modernism/modernity * In and Out of Sight is powered by a truly interdisciplinary gathering of proofs and examples taken from photography, literature, history, and theory from the modernist moment and our own. [This book] may be the most thrilling offering of 2018"". * Shawna Ross, The Year's Work in English Studies * Alix Beeston's bold and challenging new book offers a corrective to [Gertrude] Stein's statement of filmic equivalence, asking that we linger instead with the strangeness of photography when trying to account for literary modernism's interest in serial form. â Beeston carefully establishes a body of criticism into which her own book might be situated and forges an exciting direction for future work in modernist studies, photography and literature, still-moving studies, and feminist studies. * Louise Hornby , University of California, Los Angeles , Modern Language Review * Beeston's impressive first book makes significant contributions not just to the reading of literary and visual modernism but to the understanding of gender, race, and class in twentieth-century American culture... The theoretical and critical analyses of In and Out of Sight reveal how the tensions of the photographic unseen and the still-moving field exist in the representations of gender, race, and class that American visual or verbal images and texts subordinate. * Joseph R. Millichap , MFS Modern Fiction Studies * Alix Beeston's In and Out of Sight is one of several exciting and innovative accounts of the relation between literature and photography to appear in recent years, studies that have charted a new course for the field away from a focus on questions of realism and indexicality... the readings that emerge are powerful and persuasive... [it] is a welcome contribution to modernist and visual studies, persuasive evidence that these intertwined fields remain as vibrant as ever. * Stuart Burrows, American Literary History *"