Automaton in English Renaissance Literature
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€198.40
Act III
Animal Kingdom
anthropomorphism
Bionic Women
birds
brazen
Brazen Heads
Category=DSB
Category=N
Category=NHAH
Category=PDX
Civic Pageantry
Clockwork Automata
Dense
early
Early Modern English
Early Modern Mechanism
Early Modern Poet
early modern science
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
Faerie Queene
False Florimell
Fictive Automata
Friar Bacon
head
human divinity boundary
literary machines
Machaut's Remede De Fortune
machine
Marvell's Speaker
materialist philosophy
mechanical
Mechanical Birds
mechanistic worldview in literature
michael
Milton's God
Milton's Monism
modern
Nonhuman Animals
Paradise Lost
poetic animation
Psycho Physical Dualism
Reciprocal Sliding
rise
Spenser's Talus
Winter's Tale
witmore
Product details
- ISBN 9780754668657
- Weight: 566g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Aug 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Wendy Beth Hyman is an assistant professor of English at Oberlin College, USA.
