Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture - Cultures of Automation

This book argues that thought experiments in literature demonstrate how fears and hopes around automation may have more basis in imagination than reality. The volume asks how these understandings of automation can help to understand our technological present, and our increasingly technologized future.

List of contents

List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Automation: This Time It's (Probably Not) Different
Kate Foster
1.'What we need is more automation': Automation Debates in the Postwar Period
Ben Roberts
2. When the Clock Took the Floor: Technology as Non-Human Actor in Augusto De Angelis' Detective Novel Il Banchiere Assassinato (1935)
Emanuele Stefanori
3. On the Threshold of Life and Death: Guido Cavalcanti and the Medieval Automaton
Rebecca Reilly
4. Monsters, Mechanics, and Automatic Writing in E.T.A. Hoffman's 'The Sandman' and Gérard de Nerval's 'Aurélia'
Vanessa Weller
5. Forms of Computation in Hjalmar Söderberg's and Thomas Mann's Decadent Short Stories
Laura Alice Chapot
6. Prosthetic Verse: Technology, Embodiment, and Disability in French Poetry (1984-2024)
Léon Pradeau
7. Postcolonial Agency vs. 'French Automation' in Mounsi's Territoire d'Outre-Ville
David Spieser-Landes
8. Humans in the Loop as Post-Literary Ghosts: Discomfort and Disruption on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Bruno Ministro
9. Bricolage, Wild Thought, and the Automation of Knowledge
Madeleine Chalmers
Coda
Molly Crozier
Index

About the author

Kate Foster is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on intersections of human bodies and technology in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century cultures. She is working on a monograph on fictional androids and cyborgs, and developing a new project on technology, disease and cultural history.
Molly Crozier is an early career researcher in French and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on embodiment, gender and disability in twentieth century theatre. She is working on a monograph on disability in Samuel Beckett's drama. She holds an honorary fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.

Product details

• Authors: Kate Crozier Foster
• Assisted by: Molly Crozier (Editor), Kate Foster (Editor)
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 18.09.2025
• EAN: 9781032895871
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3289587-1
• No. of pages: 232
• Series: Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Technology > Miscellaneous; TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Automation, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, LITERARY CRITICISM / Science Fiction & Fantasy, Literary studies: general, Other manufacturing technologies, Engineering: general