Description
Book Synopsis* An overview of the topic of technology in literature, covering the span from late Victorian innovations, through modernism and the cold war, to computing and the internet. * Brings together a wide range of literature in a concise, student-oriented fashion.
Trade Review"It is undoubtedly the broad engagement with popular and avant-garde culture, and the inclusion of technologies of production, destruction, replication, communication, transmission and reception that make the book so useful as a resource for researchers approaching the topic from a range of literary and cultural contexts, as well as a starting point for further study in the field. Though wide-ranging, the readings are never lacking in interest, managing to convey insightful, sophisticated and convincing arguments in accessible prose."
The British Society for Literature and Science "From railways to C3 systems, Kipling to Kittler, Alex Goody draws deftly on a remarkable range of examples to chart the modern technological imaginary. She produces a useful and accessible overview of technology's politico-cultural manifestations and an excellent survey of the theoretical underpinnings of recent scholarly approaches to the field."
Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina
"This compelling study poses searching questions about modern subjectivities by exploring the intimate relationship between writing and technology. Goody persuasively demonstrates the intricate ways in which technology is embedded in popular and avant-garde culture, from Victorian technologies of electricity and photography to the management, robotic, military and leisure technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
Martin Halliwell, Professor of American Studies, University of Leicester
"From the train crash to the photograph to the typewriter to hypertext, Alex Goody's deft introduction to technology, literature and culture is as enlightening as it is pleasurable to read. Containing sophisticated arguments linking a range of theorists of technology, including Benjamin, McLuhan, Kittler, Jameson and Haraway, Goody also illuminates the unexpected ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature interacts with the technological developments of modernity. Whether your primary interest is modernist poetry, cyberpunk, James Bond or death by electrocution, this book has something for you."
Pam Thurschwell, University of Sussex
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements.
1. Introduction: The Twentieth-Century Technological Imaginary.
2. Writing Technology: Literature and Theory.
3. Media Technologies and Modern Culture.
4. Cold War Technologies.
5. Technological Texts: from Typewriters to Hypermedia.
6. Robots, Cyborgs and the Technological Body.
Bibliography.
