Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770-1930 [Hardcover]

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction - Minds, Bodies, Machines; D.Coleman? & H.Fraser Inside the Imagination-Machines of Gothic Fiction: Estrangement, Transport, Affect; P.Otto? ? Air-Looms and Influencing Machines; S.Connor Maternity, Madness and Mechanization: The Ghastly Automaton?in James Hogg's The Three Perils of Woman; K.Inglis? Clockwork Automata, Artificial Intelligence, and Why the Body of the Author Matters; P.Crosthwaite? Metaphors and Analogies of Mind and Body in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction: George Eliot, Henry James and George Meredith; M.Banfield Alfred Wallace's Conversion: Plebian Radicalism and the Spiritual Evolution of the Mind; I.McCalman Molecular Machines and Lascivious Bodies: James Clerk Maxwell's Verse-Born Attacks on Tyndallic Reductionism; D.Brown Writing the 'Great Proteus of Disease': Influenza, Informatics, and the Body in the Late Nineteenth Century; J.Mussell Linguistic Trepanation: Brain Damage, Penetrative Seeing, and a Revolution of the Word; L.Salisbury Coda Notes Index

'Overall, this is a rewarding and well-assembled collection, required reading for anyone interested in the history of medicine and science as it relates to the history of literature. It suggests a community of scholars - mostly British and Australian, with a few North Americans - committed to an analysis of literature that foregrounds its relation to both embodiment and science.' - Tim Armstrong, New Books on Literature 19

MARIE BANFIELD PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London, UKDANIEL BROWN Professor in English, University of Western Austrls¸