...the extraordinary intimacy and tenacity of Lurz's interpretive excavations is all any reader could hope for. By bringing these qualities to bear on the literary object as literal object, Lurz provides a book that modernist studies has been awaiting for a very long time.
Novel: A Forum on Fiction
...The Death of the Book makes a vital contribution ... Read moreto current debates about modernist print culture, offering a refreshingly formalist lens on conversations too often dominated by the material determinism of book history and media studies alike.
Modernism/Modernity
Lurz's close readings cut new paths through dense texts.
Review of English Studies
The Death of the Book begins the important work of paying attention to reading and the material text in the modernist canon, and is full of fascinating and rewarding close readings.
Modernist Cultures
John Lurz believes not only that favorite modernist texts by Proust, Joyce, and Woolf exhibit a powerful awareness of mortality and temporality at a watershed juncture in the development of diverse media technologies in the early twentieth century, but that their novels exude a powerful sense of their own structures and finitude. Because these authors correlate their characters' mental and bodily attributes to the status of the book, Lurz detects a pervasive epochal obsession with death and with the material basis of the narrating and reading of books as objects-no matter how complex-in time.
Modern Philology
In The Death of the Book, Lurz demonstrates serious intellectual agility, moving between his objects of study with complexity and aplomb. In this formalist-materialist account of modernism, readers are treated to a delightful set of close readings of key modernist texts that want to take the book-as-object seriously. Crisp and lucid in argumentation, The Death of the Book is a fascinating account of modernist materialism, arguing that, as critics, we need to go beyond thinking about how literature began to act like emergent technological forms and instead turn our attention to the sensuous object of the book itself.
Dana Seitler, University of Toronto The Death of the Book is an admirably detailed and unfailingly subtle meditation of the novels of Proust, Joyce and Woolf, works in which the image of the open book or the act of reading figure the relationship between the life represented within the novel and the extra-literary life of its readers.
Maria DiBattista, Princeton University Show Less