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14 results

  • Chapter 9 - The Automaton Detective

  • from Part III - Literary Genre and Popular Fiction
  • Edited by Suzy Anger, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Thomas Vranken, University of the South Pacific
  • Book:
    Victorian Automata
    Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 195-207

  • Summary

    Early detective fiction’s anxious obsession with constructing a respectable canonical lineage ensured that texts in the genre are typically both explicit and repetitive in their intertextual referencing, and early detective fiction stories tend to link themselves back to a fairly limited set of precursor texts and tropes. This chapter argues that the automaton became one of detective fiction’s central recurring symbols in the Victorian period, a contested figure lying at the heart of a struggle over the genre and the worldview that it contained.

  • An Afterthought on Victorian Automata as Afterthought (and Signifier)

  • Edited by Suzy Anger, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Thomas Vranken, University of the South Pacific
  • Book:
    Victorian Automata
    Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 26-30

  • Summary

    This volume considers the meanings of automatism and automata for Victorian culture. In the nineteenth century, theories of automatism became central to scientific and popular understandings of human thought and action. Engineers made the first attempts at constructing mechanisms that replicated the intelligence of human beings. Mechanical automata charmed crowds. Black and Asian automata became popular commodities. This collection brings together essays by scholars of the history of science, literature, theatre, and media, which explore the widespread cultural interest in mechanical automata and conceptions of automatism in the period. The essays examine social, technological, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic developments that automata and their representation generated. They look at the conceptions of legal responsibility, volition, and creativity that theories of automatism produced, and show how automata and automatism were recruited in constructions of race. The essays examine automata and automatism in literary texts. They demonstrate that Victorian thought on automata and automatism continues to have resonance for current understandings of mind, agency, mechanism, and artificial intelligence.

Victorian Automata
  • Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century
  • Edited by Suzy Anger, Thomas Vranken
  • Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024
  • The relationship between lifelike machines and mechanistic human behaviour provoked both fascination and anxiety in Victorian culture. This collection is the first to examine the widespread cultural interest in automata – both human and mechanical – in the nineteenth century. It was in the Victorian period that industrialization first met information technology, and that theories of physical and mental human automatism became essential to both scientific and popular understandings of thought and action. Bringing together essays by a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars, this volume explores what it means to be human in a scientific and industrial age. It also considers how Victorian inquiry and practices continue to shape current thought on race, creativity, mind, and agency. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Simulating Antiquity in Boys' Adventure Fiction

Simulating Antiquity in Boys' Adventure Fiction
  • Maps and Ink Stains
  • Thomas Vranken
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • A genre that glorifies brutish masculinity and late Victorian imperialism, boys' 'lost world' adventure fiction has traditionally been studied for its politically problematic content. While attuned to these concerns, this Element approaches the genre from a different angle, viewing adventure fiction as not just a catalogue of texts but a corpus of books. Examining early editions of Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, and The Lost World, the Element argues that fin-de-siècle adventure fiction sought to resist the nineteenth-century industrialisation of book production from within. As the Element points out, the genre is filled with nostalgic simulations of material anachronisms – 'facsimiles' of fictional pre-modern paper, printing, and handwriting that re-humanise the otherwise alienating landscape of the modern book and modern literary production. The Element ends by exploring a subversive revival of lost world adventure fiction that emerged in response to ebooks at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  • “Oscar Wilde's Book”: Early American Reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray

  • E. J. Edwards, Thomas Vranken
  • Journal:
    PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 133 / Issue 1 / January 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 October 2020, pp. 199-204
    Print publication:
    January 2018

  • Oscar wilde's only novel, the picture of dorian gray, first appeared in the july 1890 issue of the american periodical lippin- cott's Monthly Magazine? While the sometimes acrimonious reception of the novel in Britain has been routinely noted, less scholarly attention has been paid to the reception of Dorian Gray in the United States. Even when scholars allude to the reaction of the press there, they do so almost always as an afterthought—as a way of juxtaposing the novel's censorious reception in Britain with its supposedly more positive reception across the Atlantic. Thus, in the introduction to his definitive edition of Dorian Gray for Oxford University Press, Joseph Bristow comments in a footnote that he has “found no evidence of outright hostility towards The Picture of Dorian Gray in the American press,” before outlining “the trouncing that Wilde … experienced” in Britain“ (ln101). Similarly, in his general introduction to the ”uncensored“ Dorian Gray for Harvard University Press, Nicholas Frankel notes of the novel, ”To be sure, appreciative and sensitive reviews appeared in Britain and America, but a significant segment of the British press reacted with outright hostility, condemning the novel as ‘vulgar,’ ‘unclean,’ ‘poisonous,’ ‘discreditable,’ and ‘a sham’“ (5). In her contribution on Wilde in the series Bloom's How to Write about Literature, Amy Watkin is even more Manichaean: ”Americans loved it,“ she declares. ”English reviewers did not“ (129).