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.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors and Co-editors
Introduction
Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason
Chapters:
Section I: Exhibitions
1. The Uncanny Valley: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sigmund Freud, Masahiro Mori
Frederick Burwick
2. The (Re-)Winding of Hoffmann’s Automata: from Offenbach’s 1881 Opera to Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 Film
Ashley Shams
3. Wounded Bodies in the Lithographs of Théodore Géricault, 1818-1820
Peter Erickson
Section II: Figures
4. Romantic Tales of Pseudo Automata: The Chess-Playing Turk in Hoffmann, Poe, and Benjamin
Wendy Nielsen
5. On Toys, Violence, and Automated Gender
Erin Goss
6. Automatic for All: Mary Shelley’s Posthuman Passion
Kate Singer
7. “A little earthly idol to contract your ideas”: Global Hermeneutics in Phebe Gibbes’s Zoriada, or, Village Annals (1786)
Kathryn Freeman
Section III: Organisms
8. Schelling’s Uncanny Organism
Stefani Engelstein
9. “it […] lives by dying”: S. T. Coleridge’s Mechanical Life and Colonial Necropolitics
Lenora Hanson
10. The Metaphysical Machinery of Mining in Novalis’s Works
Christina M. Weiler
Bibliography
Index
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.
