Romantic Automata

Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms

Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason (Eds.)

2020
264 pages
$36.95
ISBN 9781684481767
Transits

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life.

Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.

Contributors: Frederick Burwick, Ashley Shams, Peter Erickson, Wendy C. Nielsen, Erin M. Goss, Kate Singer, Kathryn S. Freeman, Stefani Engelstein, Lenora Hanson, Christina Maria Weiler

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Reviews

". . . a rich volume full of interesting topics and novel insights that makes a significant contribution to the study of the early history of posthumanism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."
- European Romantic Review, January 2023

"Romantic Automata is fascinating if idiosyncratic, and I enjoyed reading the essays immensely. Exploring literary representations of the relationship between the mechanical and the human or organic, this well-researched collection brings a range of theoretical approaches and primary sources to bear on an otherwise largely canonical debate. The readings are insightful and original, the arguments compelling and clear."
-Ghislaine McDayter, author of Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture

"Romantic Automata is a strong collection of essays that engages a broad spectrum of European Romanticism. It fills a real need in the current scholarship of Romanticism as it connects the literary fascination with automata, dolls, and machines of the early nineteenth century with contemporary theoretical concerns with gender representation and the posthuman."
-William Davis, author of Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature

About the editors:

Michael Demson is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches courses in Romanticism, literary theory, and world literature. He has published numerous scholarly articles, co-edited Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making in the Romantic Era (2019) and a graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy (2013).

Christopher R. Clason is an emeritus professor of German language and literature at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He has authored numerous articles in German medieval and Romantic literature. He is the editor of E.T.A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism (2018) and co-editor of several collections of essays.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $120.00, 978-1-6844-8177-4; EPUB: $36.95, 978-1-6844-8178-1