British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 examines the relationship between literature and technology in two directions: not only the impact of technology on Enlightenment British literature, but also the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology in the period.

KRISTIN M. GIRTEN is an associate professor of English and assistant vice chancellor for the arts and humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research focuses on intersections between literature, philosophy, and science in the British Enlightenment and in the twenty-first century, giving special emphasis to how women and other marginalized groups contribute to and feel the effects of such intersections.

AARON R. HANLON is an associate professor of English and chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is the author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism.

 

Introduction
Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon
Chapter 1: Webster’s Baroque Experiments and the Testing of Technology in the Early 1600s
Laura Francis
Chapter 2: Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe
Erik L. Johnson
Chapter 3: The Technology and Theatricality of Three Hours after Marriage’s “Touch-Stone of Virginity”
Thomas A. Oldham
Chapter 4: Gulliver’s Travels, Automation, and the Reckoning Author
Zachary M. Mann
Chapter 5: Designing the Enlightenment Anthropocene
Kevin MacDonnell
Chapter 6: Technology, Temporality, and Queer Form in Horace Walpole’s Gothic
Emily M. West
Chapter 7: Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas”
Deven M. Parker
Chapter 8: Percy Shelley, Political Machines, and the Pre-History of the Post-Liberal
Jamison Kantor
Afterword: On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa
Joseph Drury
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index