1st Edition
Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture Artificial Slaves
1. Introduction: Intelligent Tools/Rebellious Agents Part I: In Our Physical Image: Bodies, Body Parts, and Instruments 2. Real Human Automata from the Pre-Empirical Era 3. Whole Bodies: Alchemy, Cabala, and the Embodiment of Force 4. Body Parts: Talking Brass Heads, Dangerous Knowledge, and Robert Greene’s Plays Part II: In Our Operative Image: The Networked Servant Foreshadowed 5. Prospero’s Ethereal Prosthesis 6. Doctor Faustus: Losing Control of the Apparatus 7. Points of Contact
Biography
Kevin LaGrandeur is Associate Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology, US.
'...an ambitious volume... [that] complements recent scholarship on automata in early modern literature, and will be of interest to scholars working on that topic, as well as the history of early modern science and art history.' - Renaissance Quarterly
'Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture is a lively and stimulating odyssey into a time when the engineer and the magician inhabited mental worlds that overlapped with another in a way that we might like to believe has long since vanished. It is to LaGrandeur's credit that this book helps us to recreate those worlds, while also pointing out ways in which they have not so much disappeared, but have become sublimated within a new language of control and artifice.' - Jonathan Sawday, The American Historical Review
"…in this fascinating and original book, Kevin LaGrandeur… offers an original and thought-provoking perspective that has the bracing effect of 'making strange' these very familiar texts and… by its end, few will dispute that ‘we have no monopoly, in our age, on the idea of blending the traits of the human and the machine or on the notion of creating artificial slaves’" - Science Fiction Studies
