Networks of Improvement (Paperback)

Paperback. A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Working against the stubbornly persistent image of dark satanic mills, in many ways so comforting to literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of textseconomic, medical, and more conventionally literary oneswith a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britains emerging manufacturing towns led unexpectedly to coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticisms other, Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.