This introduction argues that, together, conceptions of automata and automatism provided an expansive framework for expressing diverse, sometimes contradictory, ideas and values in Victorian culture. Introducing the contributions to the volume, this chapter considers the specific sites, uses, and meanings of automata and automatism in the nineteenth century. It examines human automatism in psychology, law, aesthetics, occultism, and science, and considers mechanical automata as entertainment, as commodity, and as racist objects. The introduction also looks at connections to factory and labor automata, and the beginnings of artificial intelligence and robotics. It additionally discusses the depiction of automata in and the influences of discourses of automatism on nineteenth-century literary works.

Chapter 2 reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the Victorian industrial novel. Deeply invested in social determination, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, nevertheless, offer sympathy as the way out of the class struggles it deplores. At the same time, sympathy is precisely one of those impurities inciting desire that Stephen explicitly disavows at the end of Portrait of the Artist. Sympathy, though, remains fundamental to Ulysses, intertwined with its reflections on an autonomy that is equal parts aesthetic and political. Sympathy is seen here to be a form of social coercion limiting Stephen’s artistic autonomy even as its absence is part of what prevents the Irish from uniting against their common enemies and achieving political autonomy. Contrasting Bloom with Stephen, I read the Blooms as a model of community that refuses to see autonomy and sympathy as opposed values, a form of family that counters the patriarchal family of the national imaginary.

One of the most destructive features of modern life is to deprive people of the sense that they are essentially creative beings. The industrialization and commercialization of work have a lot to do with this, but so too does the elevation of the fine artist as a lonely (often tortured) genius, and the reduction of people to passive consumers. In this chapter, Wirzba gives an account of good work as an indispensable means through which people contribute to the making of a beautiful world and thriving communities. To be creative is to respond to the sanctity of fellow creatures with the skill and devotion that contribute to shared flourishing. But for people to be creative in this way, the personal, social, economic, and political contexts through which they live need to be properly cultivated. The highest form of creativity is to focus and train one’s love into practical skills that join with the sacred love that is already at work in the world.

In recent years, Earth system scientists have acknowledged humanity’s Earth- and life-altering powers by calling our epoch the Anthropocene. This chapter explores the logic at work in this designation and argues that its roots go further back than the origins of industrialism and war capitalism in modernity (the Capitalocene). The essential and enduring issue is whether people can learn to live charitably within a world of limits. The origins of agriculture and the formation of city-states indicate what can be called a “thin Anthropocene” at work in the earliest civilizations evident around the globe. Examining this history, and the logic at work within it, enables us to see how people have thought about Earth and humanity’s place within it.