Motherless Creations

Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-23167-9
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 262 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 538 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nielsen, Wendy C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: Neuzeit

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Fictionality and Artificial Life

Part One, The Rationale for Creating Life without Mothers, 1650-1800

Chapter 1, Fables about the Birthing Body in the Long Eighteenth Century

Chapter 2, Automaton: The Analogy of ‘Man a Machine’ in Descartes and Obstetrics

Chapter 3, Pygmalion as Creator of Artificial Life

Part Two, Motherless Children in Literature of the Romantic Era, 1800-1832

Chapter 4, Homunculus and the Search for Immortality in Goethe’s Faust

Chapter 5, Olympia and the Romance Scam in Hoffmann’s The Sandman

Chapter 6, The Creature, his Companion, and the Singularity in Shelley’s Frankenstein

Chapter 7, The Golem: A Reflection on the Purpose of Artificial Life

Part Three, Making Artificial Slaves in French and American Literature, 1850-1890

Chapter 8, The Sex Bot Hadaly in Villiers’s Tomorrow’s Eve

Chapter 9, Constructing Identity through the "Iron Slave" in Melville’s The Bell-Tower

Chapter 10, White Supremacy in Ellis’s The Steam Man

Conclusion

Bibliography Illustrations

Über Autor(innen)

Wendy C. Nielsen is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, USA. She has published the book Women Warriors in Romantic Drama and scholarly essays on world literature, Romantic-era automata, theater, the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Corday, and Boadicea.