Technology, Literature and Culture

by Goody, Alex

• ISBN13: 9780745639536
• ISBN10: 0745639534
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-13
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Technology, Literature and Culture provides a detailed and accessible exploration of the ways in which literature across the twentieth century has represented the inescapable presence and progress of technology. As this study argues, from the Fordist revolution in manufacturing to computers and the internet, technology has reconfigured our relationship to ourselves, each other, and to the tools and material we use.The book considers such key topics as the legacy of late-nineteenth century technology, the literary engagement with cinema and radio, the place of typewriters and computers in formal and thematic literary innovations, the representations of technology in spy fiction and the figures of the robot and the cyborg. It considers the importance of broadcast technology and the internet in literature and covers major literary movements including modernism, cold war writing, postmodernism and the emergence of new textualities at the end of the century.An insightful and wide-ranging study, Technology, Literature and Culture offers close readings of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Ian Fleming, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson and Shelley Jackson. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike in literary and cultural studies, and also introduces the topic to a general reader interested in the role of technology in the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Alex Goody is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Twentieth-Century Technological Imaginary

Writing Technology: Literature and Theory

Media Technologies and Modern Culture

Cold War Technologies

Technological Texts: from Typewriters to Hypermedia

Robots, Cyborgs and the Technological Body

Bibliography

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