Victorian Automata

Suzy Anger teaches English and Science Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is author of the Rudikoff Prize-winning Victorian Interpretation (2005), editor of Knowing the Past (1999), and co-editor of Victorian Science as Cultural Authority (2011). She is past President of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. Thomas Vranken is a lecturer in literary studies at the University of the South Pacific. His research explores nineteenth-century literature's relationship with technology and print culture. He is the author of Simulating Antiquity in Boys' Adventure Fiction: Maps and Ink Stains (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation (2019).

List of figures; List of contributors; Introduction: the Victorian automata/automatism schema Suzy Anger; An afterthought on Victorian automata as afterthought (and signifier) Thomas Vranken; Part I. Mechanical Automata: 1. The mimetic faculty at work: the golden age of automata Kara Reilly; 2. Black steam: patents, portals, and the counter-histories of the Victorian android Edward Jones-Imhotep and Alexander Offord; 3. A short history of human-automata interaction Simone Natale; Part II. Automatism: 4. The dialectic of automatism and free will Roger Smith; 5. The poetry of conscious automatism Suzy Anger; 6. 'No purpose, heart or mind or will': James Thomson (B. V.) and psychological automatism Tyson Stolte; 7. Creative trollope Linda Austin; 8. Darwin and agency – intention or automatism? George Levine; Part III. Literary Genre and Popular Fiction: 9. The automaton detective: Victorian reverberations Thomas Vranken and Stephen Knight; 10. 'A doll, a dummy, a nothing!': the criminal mesmerist, his automaton-subject, and debates on criminal responsibility in Richard Marsh Shuhita Bhattacharjee; 11. The invasion of the white mind: race, automatism, and mental hierarchy in the late-nineteenth century Aren Roukema; Part IV. Interactions: 12. Sublime puppets versus uncanny automata: artificial beings in nineteenth-century literature Minsoo Kang; 13. The strange career of topsy: the problem of automata in the age of slave emancipation Chris Dingwall; 14. George Eliot among the machines Sally Shuttleworth; 15. A disembodied voice, yet the voice of a human soul: decadent automacy in L'Ève Future Richard Menke; Index.