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    British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830

    Kristin M. Girten (Edited by), Aaron R. Hanlon (Edited by), Kristin M. Girten (Contributions by), Aaron R. Hanlon (Contributions by), Laura Francis (Contributions by), Erik L. Johnson (Contributions by), Thomas A. Oldham (Contributions by), Zachary M. Mann (Contributions by), Kevin MacDonnell (Contributions by), Emily M. West (Contributions by), Deven M. Parker (Contributions by), Jamison Kantor (Contributions by), Joseph Drury (Contributions by)

    9781684483952

    Paperback / softback, published 13 January 2023

    216 pages, 6 b-w illus., 8 color illus.
    23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.059 kg

    "This collection is full of superb scholarship that makes substantial contributions to our understanding of technology." (Technology and Culture) “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) "British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830 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 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)

    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.”

     

     

    Introduction
    Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon
    Chapter 1: Webster’
    s 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 Marriage’
    s     “
    Touch-Stone of Virginity”

    Thomas A. Oldham
    Chapter 4: Gulliver’
    s 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 Walpole’
    s Gothic
    Emily M. West
    Chapter 7: Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworth’
    s “
    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
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