Victorian Automata

Reviews / Votes

'This fascinating and thoroughly readable collection invites us into the longer histories of our own encounters with driverless cars and artificial intelligence. Revealing just how central the automaton was to nineteenth-century intellectual life, these wide-ranging essays make an invaluable - and timely - contribution to our understanding of the period, from its theories of consciousness, racial difference, and labour, to its debates over instinct and agency.' Tina Young Choi, Professor of English, York University 'Like us, Victorians confronted new machines that seemed to do things only humans could do. What did automata mean for that earlier technological and cultural age? This outstanding collection contributes revealing new critical perspectives and topics - including detective fiction, hypnotism, and law; gender, evolution, and race - to the tortuous history of human-machine relations.' John Tresch, Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice, Warburg Institute, University of London 'Suzy Anger, Thomas Vranken, and their collaborators make a much needed contribution to the field that has sometimes facetiously been dubbed 'automaton studies.' Offering a wide range of case studies and insights, they succeed simultaneously in portraying what is distinctive about automata and automatism in the Victorian age, and in inviting us to tackle time-honoured questions about humans, machines, volition, and coercion.' Heidi Voskuhl, Associate Professor of History of Science, University of Pennsylvania 'An impressive volume of essays that explore the many guises of automata in the nineteenth century ... This is an engaging and highly readable collection with much of interest for those in the field.' Jessica Thomas, The British Society for Literature and Science