Faces, faces, faces - faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. Anca Parvulescu's prehistory of facial recognition technologies retells the story of literary modernism through the prism of the human face. She constructs an arc between twenty first-century conversations about the politics of the face and those physiognomic discourses that reflect modernism's long, complex and fascinating cultural history. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.