Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 18602000 [Paperback]

Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s onwards.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. This book will be of interest to scholars of moderinism, literature and film.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. This book will be of interest to scholars of moderinism, literature and film.Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash , or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction; 1. Sensation drama, the railway and modernity; 2. Sensation fiction and the modernisation of the senses; 3. The Boerograph; 4. 'It': the last machine and the invention of sex appeal; 5. Crash: flesh, steel, and celluloid.Review of the hardback: 'This is a concise, impeccabll£$