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Publication Date
2023
Description
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.”
Keywords
Literature and technology, literature and Enlightenment, literature and science, eighteenth-century technology, eighteenth-century literature, Mary Hearne, Daniel Defoe, John Webster, The Changeling, Three Hours after Marriage, Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver’s third voyage, Anthropocene, William Hogarth, James Watt, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, queer temporality, queer theory, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, Richard Dawkins, Royal Society, History of technology
Rights
This collection copyright © 2023 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2023 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Type
text, 6 b-w illus., 8 color illus.; 214 pages
ISBN
9781684483990