Technology and the Early Modern Self

by Cohen, Adam Max

• ISBN13: 9780230609877
• ISBN10: 0230609872
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Scholars have recently interrogated the inventions of the early modern period for their impact on the cultures into which they were introduced. Technology and the Early Modern Self engages in this compelling new area of study, while eschewing generalities. Instead, it examines the interactions between particular technologies and specific personality traits. From clocks and discipline, to print technology and ambition, to gunpowder and versatility, to optics and perspective, each of this book's four sections takes full advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary literary and cultural studies to shed new light on the relationships between technologies and the people who first used them. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Adam Max Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: A New Instrument	p. 1
The Clockwork Self: Mechanical Clockwork and Early Modern Discipline	p. 23
Confessions of a Man in Print: Cataloguing Erasmian Literary Ambition	p. 53
Painted Words Put into the Press: The Forms and Functions of Ambition in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender	p. 71
All Works and No Plays: Jonson's 1616 Folio and the Redefinition of Dramatic Authorship	p. 91
The Nimble Gunner and the Versatile Prince: Agility and the Early Modern Military Revolution	p. 115
Perspectives on Perspective: The Philosophic Eye and the Prehistory of the Telescope and the Microscope	p. 137
A New "Perspective Glass": Telescopic Discoveries of Universal Uniformity	p. 151
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand": Microscopic Perspectives on Subvisible Wonders	p. 173
Afterword: Reconsiderations and Prospects	p. 209
Notes	p. 215
Bibliography	p. 247
Index	p. 261
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