Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance - Hardcover

Benesch, Klaus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558493239 ISBN 13: 9781558493230

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

Synopsis

Literary critics have long regarded the rejection of technology as a distinguishing feature of American Romanticism. Yet as Klaus Benesch shows in this insightful study, the attitude of antebellum writers toward the advent of the machine age was far more complicated than often supposed. Although fraught with tension, the relationship between professional authorship and evolving technology reflected a pattern of adjustment rather than opposition, as writers sought to redefine their place within a culture that increasingly valued the engineer and the scientist.

According to Benesch, major writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Rebecca Harding Davis recognized technology as a powerful engine of social change -- a driving force that threatened to subordinate their creative faculties to the inexorable dictates of industrial production. In response, they conjured up "cybernetic" self-representations that attempted to preserve the autonomy of the individual author in the face of ongoing technological encroachment. These biomechanical images helped writers construct a hybrid identity that reconciled new modes of technological production with older, more organic models of professional writing.

In the end, Benesch argues, Romantic literary discourse is marked as much by admiration for the technological as by strains of resentment and cultural anxiety about its negative effects. As such, it prefigures in important and previously unacknowledged ways the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities that would follow.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Explores the relationship between authorship and technology in nineteenth-century America.

About the Author:

Klaus Benesch is professor of English at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1558493239
• ISBN 13: 9781558493230
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256