Networks of Improvement (Paperback)

Professor Jon Mee

ISBN 10: 0226828387 / ISBN 13: 9780226828381

Published by The University of Chicago Press, 2023

About this Item

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. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780226828381

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Networks of Improvement (Paperback)
• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226828387
• ISBN 13: 9780226828381
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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 characteristic of 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 texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly 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 Romanticism’s “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.

About the Author

Jon Mee is professor in the Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of five books, including Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty and Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830.