Rewriting the Mechanic

Text, Technology, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century

Emily M. West

2026
228 pages
$49.95
ISBN 9781684486113
Transits

In the eighteenth century, "technology" didn't name a particular device or a process. It referred instead to written accounts of the mechanical arts, a now-obsolete category encompassing the wide range of work done by hand, from baking bread to building ships. Rewriting the Mechanic examines how these written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritative, and able to make speculative possibilities real - as what we now call technological. Reversing the familiar story in which literature simply reflects technological change, West draws on the work of Robert Hooke, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen to demonstrate the influence of literary techniques on ideas about masculinity, power, and the body, and how these texts helped to bring the very idea of technological modernity into being.

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Reviews
"Emily West's Rewriting the Mechanic is an exhilaratingly interdisciplinary deep dive into four pivotal eighteenth-century technologies of science, violence, and production (the microscope, the telescope, the gun, and the spinning jenny) that embodied futurities both artificial and real, and bodies both natural and crafted. Rewriting the Mechanic is required reading for scholars and students of body and disability studies, material culture, gender studies, and early modern literature alike." - Deborah Needleman Armintor, author of The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

"Emily West's masterful Rewriting the Mechanic is sure to have significant scholarly impact as it recalibrates our understanding of the important role speculative literary techniques played in the making of modernity. West encourages an invigorated appreciation for how Enlightenment-era literary representations do not simply respond to technological innovations but frequently, and more importantly, help produce the very possibility of such innovations. Analyzing a broad and diverse collection of eighteenth-century British texts, Rewriting the Mechanic shows how literary methods helped not only establish but also naturalize fundamentally artificial conceptions of ability and authority, which were closely associated with claims to mechanical superiority. The story West tells is illuminating and offers new ways of understanding the British Enlightenment and its enduring legacy." - Kristin M. Girten, coeditor of British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 (Bucknell University Press)

"Rewriting the Mechanic shows how 'technological capacity' - the great sinew of modernity - only emerges in the eighteenth century from literary forms of speculation, and only as those mechanisms innovated new forms of embodied subjectivity that reconceptualized systems of (dis)ability and authority. West brings eighteenth-century science and technology studies into dialogue with sexuality and gender studies, trans studies, and disability studies to produce an original and generative account of how the mechanical arts became central to how the modern state imagined its imperial future." - Al Coppola, author of The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain

About the author:

EMILY M. WEST is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 9781684486120; Ebook: $49.95, 9781684486137