British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830
Aaron R Hanlon author Kristin M Girten author Aaron R Hanlon editor Kristin M Girten editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Published:13th Jan '23
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£124.00(9781684483969)
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.”
“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 Hanlon’s 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 *
“By focusing exclusively on humanity’s 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, 1600–1830 will hold broad interest for . . . anyone—critic, teacher, student—seeking tools to comprehend human intervention in the world.” * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *
“This collection is full of superb scholarship that makes substantial contributions to our understanding of technology.” * Technology and Culture *
ISBN: 9781684483952
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 18mm
Weight: 367g
216 pages