British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830

Kristin M. Girten, Aaron R. Hanlon

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781684483952, 9781684483969
• eBook ISBN: 9781684483976
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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."

 

 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Webster’s Baroque Experiments and the Testing of Technology in the Early 1600s
• 2. Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe
• 3. The Technology and Theatricality of Three Hours after Marriage’s “Touch-Stone of Virginity”
• 4. Gulliver’s Travels, Automation, and the Reckoning Author
• 5. Designing the Enlightenment Anthropocene
• 6. Technology, Temporality, and Queer Form in Horace Walpole’s Gothic
• 7. Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas”
• 8. Percy Shelley, Political Machines, and the Prehistory of the Postliberal
• Afterword: On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index