Concrete and Plastic: Thinking through Materiality [Paperback]

Plastic and concrete are two of the most ubiquitous materials of the modern age. This open access book traces inventions, inventories and interventions of these materials as they pervade our day-to-day lives across various forms.

By proposing we think of the ways materials configure 'future artefacts', and by recognizing the various ways in which materials shape our encounters with the world, the book explores the productive tensions implicit in, and between, concrete and plastic. Drawing ona wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, poems, souvenirs, advertisements, policy documents, environmental art, wrapping,and (popular) science writing, the book attends to all kinds of cultural artefacts to trace imaginative entanglements with disparate others in the Anthropocene.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The University of Rostock.

Bringing plastic and concrete - two of the contemporary age's most significant materials - together, this book uses a wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, advertisements, policy documents and (popular) science writing, to explore the material conditions of modern life.Kylie Craneis Professor of British and American Cultural Studies at the University of Rostock, Germany.

Kylie Crane's fascinating new book traces two of the most pervasive and pertinent materials of modernity: plastic and concrete ... What the book [makes] clear is that to study such diffractions of plastic and/with concrete is a particularly apt way to come to terms with modernity both in its cultural expressions and its naturecultural repercussions in the Anthropocene. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies

This book performs an exciting update to methods in material culture studies, bridging these to concerns rlc