Title: Literature, technology, and modernity, 1860-2000 /
Authors: Daly, Nicholas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: English literature History and criticism; Technology in literature.; Literature and technology Great Britain History; Modernism (Literature) Great Britain; Railroad travel in literature.; Machinery in literature.; Railroads in literature.; Littérature anglaise Thèmes, motifs.; Littérature anglaise Thèmes, motifs.; Technologie dans la littérature.; Littérature et technologie Grande Bretagne Histoire.; Modernisme (Littérature) Grande-Bretagne.; Voyages en train dans la littérature.; Machines dans la littérature.; Chemins de fer dans la littérature.
Abstract: "The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical. Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Daly begins with Victorian railway melodramas in which an individual is rescued from the path of the train just in time, and ends with J.G. Ballard's novel Crash in which people seek out such collisions. Daly argues that these collisions dramatize the relationship between the individual and modern industrial society, and suggests that the pleasures of fictional suspense help people to assimilate the speeding up of everyday life.
Contents: Introduction -- Sensation drama, the railway, and moderdernity -- Sensation fiction and the modernizatin of the senses -- The Boerograph -- 'It': the last machine and the invention of sex appeal -- Crash: flesh, steel, and celluloid.