Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000

by Nicholas Daly

Overview

Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the "crash", or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521833929
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/12/2004
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Daly is Lecturer in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1999), and of articles in Novel, ELH, Victorian Studies, New Formations, among others.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction; 1. Sensation drama, the railway and modernity; 2. Sensation fiction and the modernisation of the senses; 3. The Boerograph; 4. 'It': the last machine and the invention of sex appeal; 5. Crash: flesh, steel, and celluloid.

Editorial Reviews

Review of the hardback: 'This is a concise, impeccably researched book, which teases out a coherent narrative from a seemingly disparate set of cultural sources.' The Times Literary Supplement

Review of the hardback: 'Literature, Technology, and Modernity delivers a compelling, original, and intellectually sophisticated account …' English

Review of the hardback: 'Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 is inventive, resourceful, and well-grounded in the social and cultural history of the hundred and forty year period the book covers. Daly's book is a great read …' Modernism/Modernity

From the Publisher