Whereas previous books have explored how literature depicts or discusses scientific concepts, this book argues that literature is a technology. It shows how literature has been shaped by technological revolutions, and reveals the essential work that literature has done in helping to uncover the consequences of new technologies. Individual chapters focus on how specific literary technologies – the development of writing, the printing press, the typewriter, the computer – changed the kinds of stories it was possible to tell, and how one could tell them. They also cover the way in which literature has engaged with nonliterary technologies – clocks, compasses, trains, telegraphs, cameras, bombs, computer networks – to help its readers to work through the new social configurations and new possibilities for human identity and imagination that they unveil. Human life is inescapably mediated through technology; literature demonstrates this, and thus helps its readers to engage consciously and actively with their technological worlds.

This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.

This chapter takes up the literary reverberations of two types of photography – still and moving – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The invention and popularization of still photography in the nineteenth century posed a challenge to all existing forms of representation, visual or otherwise: Whereas earlier forms offered necessarily imperfect, inexact, and approximate renderings of depicted subjects, the detached “camera eye” promised total transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. With the invention of silent film and, later, talkies, the camera extended its dominion of objective representation into further dimensions and modalities. Carver reads work by William Empson, William James, W. H. Auden and others to argue that cameras served “not only to make the visible world familiar, as early inventors hoped they might do, but also to make it strange.”

This chapter investigates the role of optical technology in the literature of the late Early Modern period. It focuses primarily on literary engagement with the telescope, invented in the early seventeenth century in the Netherlands. In exploring representations of telescopes and optical technology in Early Modern literary, this chapter explores the duality by which, on the one hand, such technologies promised the godlike ability to make the unseen seen and the unknowable known; yet, on the other, allowed for the creation of seemingly miraculous mirages, illusions, and visual tricks. Herman argues that the lesson of works such as Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon is that we must remain skeptical of the notion that any technology can relieve us of the burden of sustained critical engagement. “The telescope does not automatically reveal the truth,” Herman concludes: “The image it presents must be interpreted.”

Media historians speak of three “medium shifts” in the history of literature: from orality to writing, from writing to print, and from print to digital. This chapter investigates the history and the significance of the most recent shift, while questioning the notion of an absolute “rupture” with orality, manuscript, and print, all of which remain vital parts of the global literary ecosystem. Drawing on Benjamin Peters’s tripartite approach to the digital in terms of pointing, counting, and manipulating, Foxman argues that the developments in the digital representation of texts have continued to challenge divisions long held to be immutable – not least, those separating content, author, and reading. As we arrive in the digital present, Foxman argues, we are left questioning all our traditional beliefs about what text is.

This chapter charts the historical development of a series of technologies for transmitting handwritten literary texts. It focuses on writing surfaces such as clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper; book formats such as scrolls and codices; scribal practices such as the introduction of spaces between words; and the social organizations through which manuscript texts were produced and circulated, such as the medieval scriptorium. Mak argues that the human hand in particular “supports the production and circulation of ideas in manuscript, printed, digital, and other forms.” It is, she argues, central to all textual transmission, “whether it be slave scribes who took dictation in antiquity, stonecutters who fashioned the inkstones to the world of scholarship and art in China, or the legions of students and overseas workers who manually transcribe and encode literary, medical, and other texts in service of their digital use.”