Networks of Improvement

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A01=Jon Mee
A01=Professor Jon Mee
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Author_Jon Mee
Author_Professor Jon Mee
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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Category=HBTK
Category=NHTK
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
improvement
Industrial Revolution
Language_English
literary and philosophical societies
networks
PA=Available
political economy
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
Romanticism
science
Scottish Enlightenment
softlaunch
transpennine enlightenment
useful knowledge

Product details

  • ISBN 9780226828374
  • Weight: 513g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 10 Oct 2023
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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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.
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.

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