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Victorian Automata
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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.
Download or read book Victorian Automata written by Suzy Anger and published by . This book was released on 2024-03-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Steaming Into a Victorian Future by : Julie Anne Taddeo
Download or read book Steaming Into a Victorian Future written by Julie Anne Taddeo and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Automata in the Victorian Imagination by : Ethan Taylor Stephenson
Download or read book Automata in the Victorian Imagination written by Ethan Taylor Stephenson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation tracks the automaton's appearance in Victorian literature from 1840 to 1900. It shows how authors across genre, form, and time conceptualized and responded to the Machine Age, using the automaton as a symbol of humanity's changing relationship to machine technologies. Chapters 1 and 5 trace how Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and E.E. Kellett's "The New Frankenstein" (1900) similarly address concerns about gender equality in Victorian Britain, challenging the assumption that women could themselves be classified, and controlled, as talking/reproducing automata. Chapter 2 argues that Dickens's conceptualization of the human machine in Our Mutual Friend (1865) allows his working-class characters a degree of class mobility outside of bourgeois object-oriented ontologies. The automaton informs Dickens's commentary on Victorian class. Chapter 3 reads The Coming Race (1871) as a reactionary response to what Bulwer-Lytton perceived as the machine's potential to liberate women from the domestic sphere. In this dystopic vision, women would necessarily come to control all aspects of society when freed of housework by the machine. Chapter 4 looks at Scots working-class poet Alexander Anderson's 1878 collection Songs of the Rail. Anderson lauds the train engine as savoir and prophet of a coming technological age. I argue that he creates a literary aesthetics for that age by anthropomorphizing the steam engine, extending to it his own poetic voice.
Download or read book Genesis Redux written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.
Book Synopsis Victorian Technology by : Herbert Sussman
Download or read book Victorian Technology written by Herbert Sussman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening history of 19th-century technology, focusing on the connections between invention and cultural values. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine captures the extraordinary surge of energy and invention that catapulted 19th-century England into the position of the world's first industrialized nation. It was an astonishing transformation, one that shaped—and was shaped by—the values of the Victorian era, and that laid the groundwork for the consumer-based society in which we currently live. Filled with vivid details and fascinating insights into the impact of the Industrial Revolution on peoples' lives, Victorian Technology locates the forerunners of the defining technologies of the our time in 19th-century England: the computer, the Internet, mass transit, and mass communication. Readers will encounter the innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs behind history-making breakthroughs in communications (the transatlantic cable, wireless communication), mass production (the integrated factory), transportation (railroads, gliders, automobiles), and more.
Book Synopsis Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology by : Linda M. Austin
Download or read book Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology written by Linda M. Austin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late nineteenth century saw a re-examination of artistic creativity in response to questions surrounding the relation between human beings and automata. These questions arose from findings in the 'new psychology', physiological research that diminished the primacy of mind and viewed human action as neurological and systemic. Concentrating on British and continental culture from 1870 to 1911, this unique study explores ways in which the idea of automatism helped shape ballet, art photography, literature, and professional writing. Drawing on documents including novels and travel essays, Linda M. Austin finds a link between efforts to establish standards of artistic practice and challenges to the idea of human exceptionalism. Austin presents each artistic discipline as an example of the same process: creation that should be intended, but involving actions that evade mental control. This study considers how late nineteenth-century literature and arts tackled the scientific question, 'Are we automata?'
Book Synopsis Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel by : Vanessa L. Ryan
Download or read book Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel written by Vanessa L. Ryan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.
Book Synopsis Victorian Science and Literature, Part I Vol 2 by : Gowan Dawson
Download or read book Victorian Science and Literature, Part I Vol 2 written by Gowan Dawson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eight-volume, reset edition in two parts collects rare primary sources on Victorian science, literature and culture. The sources cover both scientific writing that has an aesthetic component – what might be called 'the literature of science' – and more overtly literary texts that deal with scientific matters.
Book Synopsis How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon by : Iwan Rhys Morus
Download or read book How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon written by Iwan Rhys Morus and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '[An] insightful analysis of 19th-century futurism ... Morus's account is as much a cautionary tale as a flag-waving celebration.' - DUNCAN BELL, NEW STATESMAN '[ How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon] rattles thrillingly through such developments as the Transatlantic telegraph cable, the steam locomotive and electric power and recalls the excitable predictions of the fiction of the time.' KATY GUEST, THE GUARDIAN 'Excellent ... A terrific insight into why the Victorian era was a golden age of engineering.' - NICK SMITH, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE By the end of the Victorian era, the world had changed irrevocably. The speed of the technological development brought about between 1800 and 1900 was completely unprecedented in human history. And as the Victorians looked to the skies and beyond as the next frontier to be explored and conquered, they were inventing, shaping and moulding the very idea of the future. To get us to this future, the Victorians created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilisation of the resources of Empire - and they revolutionised science in the process. In this rich and absorbing book, distinguished historian of science Iwan Rhys Morus tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage's dream of mechanising mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's tunnel beneath the Thames, from George Cayley's fantasies of powered flight to Nikola Tesla's visions of an electrical world, this is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures - a vibrant tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world and ultimately took us to the Moon.
Book Synopsis Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture by : Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Download or read book Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture written by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.
Book Synopsis Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond by : Tombul, I??l
Download or read book Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond written by Tombul, I??l and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 990 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orientalism is about much more than just information gathered about the East within its general postcolonial period. In this period, orientalism is a Western discourse that dominated and shaped the view of the East. There is “otherization” in the way the West has historically looked at the East and within the information presented about it. These original stories of travelers in the past and previous telling about the East are facing a reconstruction through modern types of media. Cinema, television, news, newspaper, magazine, internet, social media, photography, literature, and more are transforming the way the East is presented and viewed. Under the headings of post-orientalism, neo-orientalism, or self-orientalism, these new orientalist forms of work in combination with both new and traditional media are redefining orientalism in the media and beyond. The Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond shows how both new media and traditional media deal with orientalism today through the presentation of gender, race, religion, and culture that make up orientalist theory. The chapters focus on how orientalism is presented in the media, cinema, TV, photography, and more. This book is ideal for communications theorists, media analysts, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students working in fields that include mass media, communications, film studies, ethnic studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.
Book Synopsis Dreamworlds of Race by : Duncan Bell
Download or read book Dreamworlds of Race written by Duncan Bell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.
Book Synopsis England's Secret Weapon by : Amanda Field
Download or read book England's Secret Weapon written by Amanda Field and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England's Secret Weapon explores the way Hollywood used Sherlock Holmes in a series of fourteen films spanning the years of World War II in Europe, from The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939 to Dressed to Kill in 1946. Basil Rathbone's portrayal of Holmes has influenced every actor who has since played him on film, TV, stage and radio, yet the film series has, until now, been neglected in terms of detailed critical analysis. The book looks at the films themselves in combination with their historical context and examines how the studio ‘updated' Holmes and recruited him to fight the Nazis, steering a careful course between modernising the detective and making sure he was still recognisable as the ‘old Holmes’ in clothes, locations and behaviour.
Download or read book Victorian Studies Bulletin written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Eminent Victorian Chess Players by : Tim Harding
Download or read book Eminent Victorian Chess Players written by Tim Harding and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book portrays British chess life in the nineteenth century through biographical studies of ten players who shaped the modern game. From Captain Evans, inventor of the famous gambit, to Isidor Gunsberg, England's first challenger for the world championship, personal narratives are blended with game annotations to reassess players' achievements and character. The author has combined deep reading in primary sources with genealogical research to reveal new facts and correct previous misunderstandings. Major chapters on Howard Staunton and William Steinitz, in particular, highlight the tensions between Englishmen and immigrants, amateurs and professionals. The contrasting long careers of Henry Bird and Joseph Blackburne provide a thread of continuity. The lives of several other important figures in Victorian chess are also presented. More than 160 games (with diagrams), several annotated in detail, and 50 photographs and line drawings are included. Appendices provide career records for all ten; there are extensive notes, a bibliography and indexes.
Book Synopsis The Sympathetic Medium by : Jill Galvan
Download or read book The Sympathetic Medium written by Jill Galvan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated. Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers.Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self.
