Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-521-83392-9
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 170 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 406 g

Industrial modernity takes it as self-evident that there is a difference between people and machines, but the corollary of this has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical. Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Daly begins with Victorian railway melodramas in which an individual is rescued from the path of the train just in time, and ends with J.G. Ballard's novel Crash in which people seek out such collisions. Daly argues that these collisions dramatize the relationship between the individual and modern industrial society, and suggests that the pleasures of fictional suspense help people to assimilate the speeding up of everyday life. This book will be of interest to scholars of moderinism, literature and film.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Daly, Nicholas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Daly, Nicholas
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.