British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 examines the relationship between literature and technology in two directions: not only the impact of technology on Enlightenment British literature, but also the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology in the period.
Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”
Arvustused
"This collection is full of superb scholarship that makes substantial contributions to our understanding of technology." * Technology and Culture * By focusing exclusively on humanitys unruly tools, this book opens a compelling mosaic view of technology that tiles together everything from the wiles of Jacobean stagecraft to the terza rima utopias of Romantic poets (10). . . . The essays gathered in British Literature and Technology, 16001830 will hold broad interest for . . . anyonecritic, teacher, studentseeking tools to comprehend human intervention in the world. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction * "British Literature and Technology, 16001830 has much to offer readers interested in the social history of technology and in literature and science studies more broadly." * Journal of British Studies * In a series of wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and finely argued essays, this volume marks a major advance in studies of science and literature. By thinking about literature itself as a kind of technology, the collection represents interdisciplinary scholarship at its best. -- Jess Keiser * author of Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience * Innovative in concept, scope, and execution, Girten and Hanlons collection studies the rich interplay between literature and technology during the scientific revolution. Prefaced by a sophisticated introduction, this volume is necessary reading for students and scholars interested in literary studies, science, technology and society, and the history of science. -- Tita Chico * author of The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment *
Introduction
Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon
Chapter 1: Websters Baroque Experiments and the Testing of Technology in the
Early 1600s
Laura Francis
Chapter 2: Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe
Erik L. Johnson
Chapter 3: The Technology and Theatricality of Three Hours after Marriages
Touch-Stone of Virginity
Thomas A. Oldham
Chapter 4: Gullivers Travels, Automation, and the Reckoning Author
Zachary M. Mann
Chapter 5: Designing the Enlightenment Anthropocene
Kevin MacDonnell
Chapter 6: Technology, Temporality, and Queer Form in Horace Walpoles
Gothic
Emily M. West
Chapter 7: Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworths Lame Jervas
Deven M. Parker
Chapter 8: Percy Shelley, Political Machines, and the Pre-History of the
Post-Liberal
Jamison Kantor
Afterword: On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and
Vice Versa
Joseph Drury
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
KRISTIN M. GIRTEN is an associate professor of English and assistant vice chancellor for the arts and humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research focuses on intersections between literature, philosophy, and science in the British Enlightenment and in the twenty-first century, giving special emphasis to how women and other marginalized groups contribute to and feel the effects of such intersections.
AARON R. HANLON is an associate professor of English and chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is the author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism.
