Mesmerists Monsters And Machines

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Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines

Author : Martin Willis
Publisher : Kent State University Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Art
ISBN : 0873388577

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Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines by Martin Willis Pdf

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

Author : Olga Pilkington,Ace G. Pilkington
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2019-10-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498565998

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Lab Lit by Olga Pilkington,Ace G. Pilkington Pdf

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.

Hunting Captain Ahab

Author : Clare L. Spark
Publisher : Kent State University Press
Page : 36 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0873388887

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Hunting Captain Ahab by Clare L. Spark Pdf

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.

Victorian Automata

Author : Suzy Anger,Thomas Vranken
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2024-03-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781009118484

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Victorian Automata by Suzy Anger,Thomas Vranken Pdf

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.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult

Author : Tatiana Kontou
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317042280

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult by Tatiana Kontou Pdf

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.

Animals, Machines, and AI

Author : Erika Quinn,Holly Yanacek
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-11-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783110753677

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Animals, Machines, and AI by Erika Quinn,Holly Yanacek Pdf

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.

New Romantic Cyborgs

Author : Mark Coeckelbergh
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780262035460

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New Romantic Cyborgs by Mark Coeckelbergh Pdf

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.

The Late Victorian Gothic

Author : Hilary Grimes
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2016-03-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781317026259

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The Late Victorian Gothic by Hilary Grimes Pdf

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.

We Are All Monsters

Author : Andrew Mangham
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2023-02-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780262047524

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We Are All Monsters by Andrew Mangham Pdf

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.

The Gothic Imagination

Author : John C. Tibbetts
Publisher : Springer
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2011-10-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780230337961

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The Gothic Imagination by John C. Tibbetts Pdf

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.

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

Author : Emily Alder
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030326524

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Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by Emily Alder Pdf

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.

Edgar Allan Poe in Context

Author : Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 431 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107009974

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Edgar Allan Poe in Context by Kevin J. Hayes Pdf

Spend the holidays with the Master of the Macabre

The Stuff of Science Fiction

Author : Gary Westfahl
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476646954

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The Stuff of Science Fiction by Gary Westfahl Pdf

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.

The Annotated Poe

Author : Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780674055292

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The Annotated Poe by Edgar Allan Poe Pdf

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.

George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’

Author : Franco Marucci
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2022-01-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000519020

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George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ by Franco Marucci Pdf

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.