Romantic Automata

Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms

Michael Demson, Christopher R. Clason (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

264 Seiten

2020
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-176-7 (ISBN)

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A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them surfaced in Romantic literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This book is a collection of essays examining the rise of cultural suspicion of all imitations of homo sapiens and similar machinery, as witnessed in the literature and arts of the time.

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life.

Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Michael Demson is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches courses in Romanticism, literary theory, and world literature. He has published numerous scholarly articles, co-edited Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making in the Romantic Era (2019) and a graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy (2013). Christopher R. Clason is an emeritus professor of German language and literature at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He has authored numerous articles in German medieval and Romantic literature. He is the editor of E.T.A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism (2018) and co-editor of several collections of essays.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors and Co-editors

Introduction

Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason

Chapters:

Section I: Exhibitions

   1. The Uncanny Valley: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sigmund Freud, Masahiro Mori

        Frederick Burwick

   2. The (Re-)Winding of Hoffmann’s Automata: from Offenbach’s 1881 Opera to Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 Film

        Ashley Shams

   3. Wounded Bodies in the Lithographs of Théodore Géricault, 1818-1820

        Peter Erickson

Section II: Figures

   4. Romantic Tales of Pseudo Automata: The Chess-Playing Turk in Hoffmann, Poe, and Benjamin

        Wendy Nielsen

   5. On Toys, Violence, and Automated Gender

        Erin Goss

   6. Automatic for All: Mary Shelley’s Posthuman Passion

        Kate Singer

   7. “A little earthly idol to contract your ideas”: Global Hermeneutics in Phebe Gibbes’s Zoriada, or, Village Annals (1786)

        Kathryn Freeman

Section III: Organisms

   8. Schelling’s Uncanny Organism

        Stefani Engelstein

   9. “it […] lives by dying”: S. T. Coleridge’s Mechanical Life and Colonial Necropolitics

        Lenora Hanson

   10. The Metaphysical Machinery of Mining in Novalis’s Works

        Christina M. Weiler

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	02.04.2020
Co-Autor	Frederick Burwick, Ashley Shams, Peter Erickson
Zusatzinfo	9 B-W illustrations, 12 color illustrations
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Gewicht	399 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Technik
ISBN-10	1-68448-176-7 / 1684481767
ISBN-13	978-1-68448-176-7 / 9781684481767
Zustand	Neuware