| Author |
Ketabgian, Tamara |
| Year |
2011 |
| Publisher |
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press |
| Number of pages |
252 |
| ISBN |
9780472051403 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
Today we commonly describe ourselves as machines that "let off steam" or feel "under
pressure." The Lives of Machines investigates how Victorian technoculture came to
shape this language of human emotion so pervasively and irrevocably and argues that
nothing is more intensely human and affecting than the nonhuman. Tamara Ketabgian
explores the emergence of a modern and more mechanical view of human nature in Victorian
literature and culture.
Treating British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, this study examines forms
of feeling and community that combine the vital and the mechanical, the human and
the nonhuman, in surprisingly hybrid and productive alliances. Challenging accounts
of industrial alienation that still persist, the author defines mechanical character
and feeling not as erasures or negations of self, but as robust and nuanced entities
in their own right. The Lives of Machines thus offers an alternate cultural history
that traces sympathies between humans, animals, and machines in novels and nonfiction
about factory work as well as in other unexpected literary sites and genres, whether
domestic, scientific, musical, or philosophical. Ketabgian historicizes a model of
affect and community that continues to inform recent theories of technology, psychology,
and the posthuman.
