Victorian Automata

Victorian Automata
Author: Suzy Anger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2024-03-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009118560

The relationship between lifelike machines and mechanistic human behaviour provoked both fascination and anxiety in Victorian culture. This collection is the first to examine the widespread cultural interest in automata - both human and mechanical - in the nineteenth century. It was in the Victorian period that industrialization first met information technology, and that theories of physical and mental human automatism became essential to both scientific and popular understandings of thought and action. Bringing together essays by a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars, this volume explores what it means to be human in a scientific and industrial age. It also considers how Victorian inquiry and practices continue to shape current thought on race, creativity, mind, and agency. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Steaming Into a Victorian Future

Steaming Into a Victorian Future
Author: Julie Anne Taddeo
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810885867

This collection of essays explores the social and cultural aspects of steampunk, examining the various manifestations of this multi-faceted genre, in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on--and interrelationship with--popular culture and the wider society.

Genesis Redux

Genesis Redux
Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226720837

Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.

Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology

Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology
Author: Linda M. Austin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108594042

The late nineteenth century saw a re-examination of artistic creativity in response to questions surrounding the relation between human beings and automata. These questions arose from findings in the 'new psychology', physiological research that diminished the primacy of mind and viewed human action as neurological and systemic. Concentrating on British and continental culture from 1870 to 1911, this unique study explores ways in which the idea of automatism helped shape ballet, art photography, literature, and professional writing. Drawing on documents including novels and travel essays, Linda M. Austin finds a link between efforts to establish standards of artistic practice and challenges to the idea of human exceptionalism. Austin presents each artistic discipline as an example of the same process: creation that should be intended, but involving actions that evade mental control. This study considers how late nineteenth-century literature and arts tackled the scientific question, 'Are we automata?'

England's Secret Weapon

England's Secret Weapon
Author: Amanda Field
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2012-07-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0957112831

England's Secret Weapon explores the way Hollywood used Sherlock Holmes in a series of fourteen films spanning the years of World War II in Europe, from The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939 to Dressed to Kill in 1946. Basil Rathbone's portrayal of Holmes has influenced every actor who has since played him on film, TV, stage and radio, yet the film series has, until now, been neglected in terms of detailed critical analysis. The book looks at the films themselves in combination with their historical context and examines how the studio ‘updated' Holmes and recruited him to fight the Nazis, steering a careful course between modernising the detective and making sure he was still recognisable as the ‘old Holmes’ in clothes, locations and behaviour.

Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond

Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond
Author: Tombul, I??l
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 990
Release: 2021-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1799871827

Orientalism is about much more than just information gathered about the East within its general postcolonial period. In this period, orientalism is a Western discourse that dominated and shaped the view of the East. There is “otherization” in the way the West has historically looked at the East and within the information presented about it. These original stories of travelers in the past and previous telling about the East are facing a reconstruction through modern types of media. Cinema, television, news, newspaper, magazine, internet, social media, photography, literature, and more are transforming the way the East is presented and viewed. Under the headings of post-orientalism, neo-orientalism, or self-orientalism, these new orientalist forms of work in combination with both new and traditional media are redefining orientalism in the media and beyond. The Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond shows how both new media and traditional media deal with orientalism today through the presentation of gender, race, religion, and culture that make up orientalist theory. The chapters focus on how orientalism is presented in the media, cinema, TV, photography, and more. This book is ideal for communications theorists, media analysts, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students working in fields that include mass media, communications, film studies, ethnic studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.

Automata and Mechanical Toys

Automata and Mechanical Toys
Author: Mary Hillier
Publisher: Landmark Books International
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1988
Genre: Mechanical dolls
ISBN: 9781870630276

This book deals with the evolution of mechanical toys following on the history of automata from very early times.

Victorian Afterlife

Victorian Afterlife
Author: John Kucich
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2000
Genre: English fiction
ISBN: 9781452904269

Victorian Magic

Victorian Magic
Author: Geoffrey Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317273230

First published in 1976. This title brings the Victorian era to life with stories of its spectacular leading magicians, conjurers, illusionists, escapologists, scientific experimenters and tricksters. Geoffrey Lamb describes the kind of people they were and the kind of things they did, whilst keeping intact the mystery surrounding their feats. This skilful reconstruction of this branch of nineteenth-century entertainment gives us a fascinating insight into Victorians and how they liked to be amused. This title will be of interest to students of history.

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture
Author: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2015-12-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1137342404

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.