Flying Machine and Modern Literature

"This is the first work to survey the myths created by the modern literary imagination about technology." --Herbert Sussman " ... succeeds admirably, fascinatingly on all counts ... " --American Literature" " ... a landmark in the study of literary and technological history." --NMAH " ... fascinating ... a welcome addition to the growing scholarship about the impact of technology on the modern imagination." --Journal of Modern Literature Annual Review

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsList of Illustrations1. Introduction2. Leonardo da Vinci and the Modern Century The Annunciation, 17: The Necromancer, 24; Leda and the Swan, 333. Birds with a Human FaceThe Envious Eye, 44; Our Business Is With Mechanism, 48; The Murder of Birds, 554. Wells and The War in the Air5. Tumult in the Clouds: The Flying Machine and the Great Crusade6. Lindbergh in 1927: The Response of Poets to the Poem of Fact7. Origins: Some Versions of Kitty HawkHart Crane's "Cape Hatteras," 110; Muriel Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight," 117; Language and Origins, 1248. The Nearest Paradise: Forms of Flight in the 1930sRedeeming the Time, 131; Saint-Exupery, 139; The Modern Bird Poem, 1449. The Poetry of FirebombingThe Case of James Dickey, 152; The Modern Apocalypse, 16210. Spaceflight: Three Versions of Manifest Destiny Robert Frost's "Kitty Hawk" 172; Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, 180; Robert A. Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, 18511. The Moon Landing and Modern Literature The Rivalry of Poet and Astronaut, 191; The Testimony of Mailer and Bellow, 20312. Conclusion: Some Texts of the 1970s The Descent, 212; The Ascent, 217NotesSupplementary BibliographyIndex