The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature

Wendy Beth Hyman

ISBN 10: 0754668657 / ISBN 13: 9780754668657

Editore: Routledge, 2011

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nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Codice articolo 9780754668657

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature
• Editore: Routledge
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0754668657
• ISBN 13: 9780754668657
• Rilegatura: Buch
• Condizione: Neu
• Dimensioni: 240 L x 161 A x 17 P (millimetri) 240 millimetri di larghezza per 161 millimetri di altezza per 17 millimetri di profondità
• Peso: 505 grammi

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Riassunto

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Informazioni sull?autore

Wendy Beth Hyman is an assistant professor of English at Oberlin College, USA.