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).

'This fascinating and thoroughly readable collection invites us into the longer histories of our own encounters with driverless cars and artificial intelligence. Revealing just how central the automaton was to nineteenth-century intellectual life, these wide-ranging essays make an invaluable - and timely - contribution to our understanding of the period, from its theories of consciousness, racial difference, and labour, to its debates over instinct and agency.' Tina Young Choi, Professor of English, York University

• 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.