Victorians and the Machine the Literary Response to Technology by Herbert L. Sussman 1968 First Edition Hardcover Book Signed by the Author

Victorians and the Machine the Literary Response to Technology by Herbert L. Sussman 1968 First Edition Hardcover Book Signed by the Author

<Condition is Good+ as Pictured> (normal wear with markings, light edge-wear, corners slightly bumped/rubbed, some folded page corners, interior contains some writing, signed by the author, dust jacket is toned along the spine with light chipping)

—Published by Harvard University Press … "In the last thirty years," Herbert Sussman says, "the growing scholarly interest in the subject of technological change has given rise both to detailed histories of invention and to perceptive studies of the cultural effects of mechanization. [Yet] there have been no detailed studies of the specific ways in which the English Victorians, the first people to live in a culture dominated by technology, expressed their realization that the use of the machine to perform interin payical ati reat profound changes in

In discussing the imaginative and intellectual responses of the writers who had to confront the new fact of a mechanized world, Mr. Sussman shows that the literary modes used and emotional attitudes held by those writers have to a large degree determined the nature of the modern response to the machine.

Concentrating on seven representative writers — Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, William Morris, Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling - the author examines the complex ways in which the Victorians tried to adjust to the machine and to the idea that technology might not be inimical to a humane society. Challenging the oversimplified notion that their literature was escapist and that they rejected the machine, the author suggests that a new tradition developed in the nineteenth century: an attempt was made to find in the mechanized world new sources of emotional strength and beauty. Mr. Sussman shows how the machine came to occupy a central place in Victorian literature as the most appropriate symbol to define the
age.

Herbert L. Sussman teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts
Jacket design/Edith Allard with $6.00 price inside front flap


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