Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines

Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines
Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780873388573

Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.


Lab Lit

Lab Lit
Author: Olga Pilkington
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498565999

Lab Lit: Exploring Literary and Cultural Representations of Science is the first formal, systematic, scholarly investigation of laboratory literature from the perspective of literary studies. Lab Lit as a new genre has received a lot of public and media attention due to its compelling presentation of science practitioners and the relatable explanations of the scientific advancements that have shaped modern society and will continue to do so. However, the genre has been largely overlooked by scholars. This book is an introduction to the world of science for those who up till now have been immersed primarily in the world of literature. The anthology contains essays that discuss Lab Lit novels using a variety of analytical approaches. It also features theoretical essays that explore the social and literary backgrounds of Lab Lit and help the reader position the critical pieces within appropriate contexts.


Animals, Machines, and AI

Animals, Machines, and AI
Author: Erika Quinn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-11-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110753677

Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world.


We Are All Monsters

We Are All Monsters
Author: Andrew Mangham
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2023-02-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262047527

How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us. “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative. In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.


Victorian Automata

Victorian Automata
Author: Suzy Anger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2024-03-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009118560

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.


The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015

The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015
Author: Greg M. Colón Semenza
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2017-01-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501329855

From The Death of Nancy Sykes (1897) to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) and beyond, cinematic adaptations of British literature participate in a complex and fascinating history. The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015 is the only comprehensive narration of cinema's 100-year-old love affair with British literature. Unlike previous studies of literature and film, which tend to privilege particular authors such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen, or particular texts such as Frankenstein, or particular literary periods such as Medieval, this volume considers the multiple functions of filmed British literature as a cinematic subject in its own right-one reflecting the specific political and aesthetic priorities of different national and historical cinemas. In what ways has the British literary canon authorized and influenced the history and aesthetics of film, and in what ways has filmed British literature both affirmed and challenged the very idea of literary canonicity? Seeking to answer these and other key questions, this indispensable study shows how these adaptations emerged from and continue to shape the social, artistic, and commercial aspects of film history.


Steaming Into a Victorian Future

Steaming Into a Victorian Future
Author: Julie Anne Taddeo
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810885867

This collection of essays explores the social and cultural aspects of steampunk, examining the various manifestations of this multi-faceted genre, in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on--and interrelationship with--popular culture and the wider society.


Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel
Author: Anne DeWitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110724515X

Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.


Vintage Visions

Vintage Visions
Author: Arthur B. Evans
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0819574392

Vintage Visions is a seminal collection of scholarly essays on early works of science fiction and its antecedents. From Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 to Olaf Stapledon in 1937, this anthology focuses on an unusually broad range of authors and works in the genre as it emerged across the globe, including the United States, Russia, Europe, and Latin America. The book includes material that will be of interest to both scholars and fans, including an extensive bibliography of criticism on early science fiction—the first of its kind—and a chronological listing of 150 key early works. Before Dr. Strangelove, future-war fiction was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Before Terminator, a French author depicted Thomas Edison as the creator of the perfect female android. These works and others are featured in this critical anthology. Contributors include Paul K. Alkon, Andrea Bell, Josh Bernatchez, I. F. Clarke, William J. Fanning Jr., William B. Fischer, Allison de Fren, Susan Gubar, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Kamila Kinyon, Stanislaw Lem, Patrick A. McCarthy, Sylvie Romanowski, Nicholas Ruddick, and Gary Westfahl. Hardcover is un-jacketed.