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Mesmerists Monsters And Machines
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Book Synopsis Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines by : Martin Willis
Download or read book Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines written by Martin Willis and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.
Download or read book Lab Lit written by Olga Pilkington and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Hunting Captain Ahab by : Clare L. Spark
Download or read book Hunting Captain Ahab written by Clare L. Spark and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly acclaimed and provocative interdisciplinary study of the development of institutional censorship explores the complexities of 20th-century American cultural politics through the protagonists of the Melville Revival. Spark addresses the distinction between the radical and conservative Enlightenment and makes her way through Melville's often confusing and contradictory texts, examining the disputes within Melville scholarship.
Download or read book Victorian Automata written by Suzy Anger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking to today's fascinations and anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, this multidisciplinary collection is the first to examine the widespread Victorian interest in human and mechanical automata. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Book Synopsis The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult by : Tatiana Kontou
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult written by Tatiana Kontou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.
Book Synopsis Animals, Machines, and AI by : Erika Quinn
Download or read book Animals, Machines, and AI written by Erika Quinn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis New Romantic Cyborgs by : Mark Coeckelbergh
Download or read book New Romantic Cyborgs written by Mark Coeckelbergh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs. Romanticism and technology are widely assumed to be opposed to each other. Romanticism—understood as a reaction against rationalism and objectivity—is perhaps the last thing users and developers of information and communication technology (ICT) think about when they engage with computer programs and electronic devices. And yet, as Mark Coeckelbergh argues in this book, this way of thinking about technology is itself shaped by romanticism and obscures a better and deeper understanding of our relationship to technology. Coeckelbergh describes the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs. Coeckelbergh argues that current uses of ICT can be interpreted as attempting a marriage of Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism. He describes the “romantic dialectic,” when this new kind of material romanticism, particularly in the form of the cyborg as romantic figure, seems to turn into its opposite. He shows that both material romanticism and the objections to it are still part of modern thinking, and part of the romantic dialectic. Reflecting on what he calls “the end of the machine,” Coeckelbergh argues that to achieve a more profound critique of contemporary technologies and culture, we need to explore not only different ways of thinking but also different technologies—and that to accomplish the former we require the latter.
Book Synopsis The Late Victorian Gothic by : Hilary Grimes
Download or read book The Late Victorian Gothic written by Hilary Grimes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.
Book Synopsis We Are All Monsters by : Andrew Mangham
Download or read book We Are All Monsters written by Andrew Mangham and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Gothic Imagination by : John C. Tibbetts
Download or read book The Gothic Imagination written by John C. Tibbetts and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together the author's interviews with many prominent figures in fantasy, horror, and science fiction to examine the traditions and extensions of the gothic mode of storytelling over the last 200 years and its contemporary influence on film and media.
Book Synopsis Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by : Emily Alder
Download or read book Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle written by Emily Alder and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.
Book Synopsis Edgar Allan Poe in Context by : Kevin J. Hayes
Download or read book Edgar Allan Poe in Context written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spend the holidays with the Master of the Macabre
Book Synopsis The Stuff of Science Fiction by : Gary Westfahl
Download or read book The Stuff of Science Fiction written by Gary Westfahl and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While students and general readers typically cannot relate to esoteric definitions of science fiction, they readily understand the genre as a literature that characteristically deals with subjects such as new inventions, space, robot and aliens. This book looks at science fiction in precisely this manner, with twenty-one chapters that each deal with a subject that is repeatedly addressed in science fiction of recent centuries. Based on a packet of original essays that the author assembled for his classes, the book could serve as a supplemental textbook in science fiction classes, but also contains material of interest to science fiction scholars and others devoted to the genre. In some cases, chapters offer thorough surveys of numerous works involving certain subjects, such as imagined vehicles, journeys beneath the Earth and undersea adventures, discovering intriguing patterns in the ways that various writers developed their ideas. When comprehensive coverage of ubiquitous topics such as robots, aliens and the planet Mars is impossible, chapters focus on major themes referencing selected texts. A conclusion discusses other science fiction subjects that were omitted for various reasons, and a bibliography lists additional resources for the study of science fiction in general and the topics of each chapter.
Book Synopsis Futures of the Past by : Ivy Roberts
Download or read book Futures of the Past written by Ivy Roberts and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction boasts a deceptively long history, extending as far back as the 19th century. This anthology pairs original essays that introduce short stories of vintage science fiction. Critical introductions written by international experts contextualize these stories from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Inclusions range from legendary authors like Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to lesser-known figures like E.P Mitchell, George Parsons Lathrop, and Franklin Ruth.
Book Synopsis The Annotated Poe by : Edgar Allan Poe
Download or read book The Annotated Poe written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a selection of Poe's tales and poems with in-depth marginal notes elucidating his sources, obscure words and passages, and literary, biographical, and historical allusions.
Book Synopsis George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ by : Franco Marucci
Download or read book George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ written by Franco Marucci and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The negative historical judgment given to George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ amounts nowadays to a gross critical blunder, and in the last three decades the story has been firmly reinstated in Eliot’s major canon. The premise of the present book is that George Eliot’s oeuvre is a compact macrotext where themes, motifs, patterns and cultural and personal archetypes recur with variations, and that ‘The Lifted Veil’ functions as the linchpin of this oeuvre. A sequential approach to the story is authorized by the use of a mimetic enunciation that simulates a gradual ‘definition’ of events, places, and characters as they have appeared to the narrating ‘I’ in the course of time until the moment of the enunciation. Contextualizing ‘The Lifted Veil’ means placing it within Eliot’s oeuvre and against the background of Victorian mid-century fiction; in a further meaning, seeing it as intersecting various contemporary genres and subgenres, such as that of the European and American ‘literature of the veil’, that of the archetypal icon of the femme fatale, that of Wilkie Collins’s ‘dead secret’ novels. The most significant facet that critical literature on ‘The Lifted Veil’ has tended to overlook is however the encrypting of the experience of a failed religious conversion and the foreshadowing of the search for a spiritual and racial identity of Daniel Deronda, the hero of Eliot’s final novel.
Book Synopsis A cultural history of chess-players by : John Sharples
Download or read book A cultural history of chess-players written by John Sharples and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess’s status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster.
