Victorian Automata
Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century

Bringing together a multidisciplinary group of scholars, this collection examines the Victorians' profound fascination with automata.

Suzy Anger (Edited by), Thomas Vranken (Edited by)

9781009100274, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 2024

360 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

'An impressive volume of essays that explore the many guises of automata in the nineteenth century … This is an engaging and highly readable collection with much of interest for those in the field.' Jessica Thomas, The British Society for Literature and Science

The relationship between lifelike machines and mechanistic human behaviour provoked both fascination and anxiety in Victorian culture. This collection is the first to examine the widespread cultural interest in automata – both human and mechanical – in the nineteenth century. It was in the Victorian period that industrialization first met information technology, and that theories of physical and mental human automatism became essential to both scientific and popular understandings of thought and action. Bringing together essays by a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars, this volume explores what it means to be human in a scientific and industrial age. It also considers how Victorian inquiry and practices continue to shape current thought on race, creativity, mind, and agency. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction: the Victorian automata/automatism schema Suzy Anger
An afterthought on Victorian automata as afterthought (and signifier) Thomas Vranken
Part I. Mechanical Automata: 1. The mimetic faculty at work: the golden age of automata Kara Reilly
2. Black steam: patents, portals, and the counter-histories of the Victorian android Edward Jones-Imhotep and Alexander Offord
3. A short history of human-automata interaction Simone Natale
Part II. Automatism: 4. The dialectic of automatism and free will Roger Smith
5. The poetry of conscious automatism Suzy Anger
6. 'No purpose, heart or mind or will': James Thomson (B. V.) and psychological automatism Tyson Stolte
7. Creative trollope Linda Austin
8. Darwin and agency – intention or automatism? George Levine
Part III. Literary Genre and Popular Fiction: 9. The automaton detective: Victorian reverberations Thomas Vranken and Stephen Knight
10. 'A doll, a dummy, a nothing!': the criminal mesmerist, his automaton-subject, and debates on criminal responsibility in Richard Marsh Shuhita Bhattacharjee
11. The invasion of the white mind: race, automatism, and mental hierarchy in the late-nineteenth century Aren Roukema
Part IV. Interactions: 12. Sublime puppets versus uncanny automata: artificial beings in nineteenth-century literature Minsoo Kang
13. The strange career of topsy: the problem of automata in the age of slave emancipation Chris Dingwall
14. George Eliot among the machines Sally Shuttleworth
15. A disembodied voice, yet the voice of a human soul: decadent automacy in L'Ève Future Richard Menke
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]