Motherless creations : fictions of artificial life, 1650-1890 /
Wendy C. Nielsen
Bok · Engelsk · 2022
| Omfang | xiv, 247 sider : illustrasjoner
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| Opplysninger | Introduction: Fictionality and Artificial Life // Part One, The Rationale for Creating Life without Mothers, 1650-1800 / Chapter 1, Fables about the Birthing Body in the Long Eighteenth Century / Chapter 2, Automaton: The Analogy of ‘Man a Machine’ in Descartes and Obstetrics / Chapter 3, Pygmalion as Creator of Artificial Life // Part Two, Motherless Children in Literature of the Romantic Era, 1800-1832 / Chapter 4, Homunculus and the Search for Immortality in Goethe’s Faust / Chapter 5, Olympia and the Romance Scam in Hoffmann’s The Sandman / Chapter 6, The Creature, his Companion, and the Singularity in Shelley’s Frankenstein / Chapter 7, The Golem: A Reflection on the Purpose of Artificial Life // Part Three, Making Artificial Slaves in French and American Literature, 1850-1890 / Chapter 8, The Sex Bot Hadaly in Villiers’s Tomorrow’s Eve / Chapter 9, Constructing Identity through the "Iron Slave" in Melville’s The Bell-Tower / Chapter 10, White Supremacy in Ellis’s The Steam Man / Conclusion / Bibliography / Illustrations. - "This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.". - Forlagets beskrivelse
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| ISBN | 9781032266398
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