This volume considers the meanings of automatism and automata for Victorian culture. In the nineteenth century, theories of automatism became central to scientific and popular understandings of human thought and action. Engineers made the first attempts at constructing mechanisms that replicated the intelligence of human beings. Mechanical automata charmed crowds. Black and Asian automata became popular commodities. This collection brings together essays by scholars of the history of science, literature, theatre, and media, which explore the widespread cultural interest in mechanical automata and conceptions of automatism in the period. The essays examine social, technological, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic developments that automata and their representation generated. They look at the conceptions of legal responsibility, volition, and creativity that theories of automatism produced, and show how automata and automatism were recruited in constructions of race. The essays examine automata and automatism in literary texts. They demonstrate that Victorian thought on automata and automatism continues to have resonance for current understandings of mind, agency, mechanism, and artificial intelligence.

This chapter considers Herbert and Vaughan’s foundational views of science and nature, toward exploring their views of natural theology more specifically in Chapter 4. How does each poet conceive of the relationships between God, humans and nature, and does he see human inquiry into nature as leading to theological insight? Both Herbert and Vaughan engage these questions, though they differ starkly on the answers. Vaughan is less dismissive of human science than is Herbert, for instance. And although both poets share a conviction that the natural world is not as it should be, Herbert sees the world as destined for conflagration while Vaughan’s hope—repeated throughout Silex Scintillans—is instead for regeneration.

Surveys the foregoing century with regard to the contribution of literary authors to the story of natural theology in early modern England.

The notable vein of neo-Victorian fiction focused on Alfred Russel Wallace’s and Charles Darwin’s voyages in the tropics serves as the occasion for an exploration of the differences between literature and science. Whereas science seeks knowledge of the natural world, literature explores the meaning of our lives in that world. Like the dichotomy between fact and fiction, the rival claims of knowledge and meaning indicate the realm from which literature’s value to public policy derives. The study of literature’s formal resources – analogy, metaphor, myth, narrative, and more – demonstrate the untapped value of literature for revealing to policy makers the true complexity of public responses to science. Andrea Barret’s "Birds with No Feet," A. S. Byatt’s "Morpho Eugenia," and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas are read against the backdrop of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory.

Often misread by policy analysts who oppose stem cell research, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau actually presents a balanced view of science, warning against unethical scientists but suggesting ways in which the creation of chimeras would be ethically acceptable. Wells’s novel articulates principles that foreshadow the conditions bioethicists today have proposed for research on human-non-human chimeras, research that could lead to advances in treating Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, organ transplants, and more. Wells’s relation to his mentor, Thomas Huxley, dramatizes the importance of reading literary works in historical perspective and sheds light on disciplinary specialization and the two-culture split.

This introduction sketches a cultural history of dinosaur palaeontology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indicating how the book addresses the lack of literary work on the understanding of dinosaurs in this period. While dinosaurs were a British area of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, American palaeontologists took clear pre-eminence in this field from the 1870s. American research transformed dinosaurs from giant lizards into a far stranger and more heterogenous group. Fallon argues that literary scholars have not yet grappled with this cultural shift in perceptions of the dinosaurs, an omission made all the more striking by the fact that it was during the decades around 1900 that ‘dinosaur’ first became a household word. Built into this word were important ideas about imperialism, progress, romance, and the practice of science. Fallon explains how exploring this subject provides wider insights into the relationships between literature and science and between popular and specialist science writers, in addition to its value as a case study on the transatlantic nature of literary media at the end of the nineteenth century.

When we think of Wallace Stevens and the question of ecological poetics, we probably are drawn to think of what he called his poetic “mundo”: a poetic universe structured by the turning of the seasons, which themselves correspond to distinct philosophical and phenomenological stances. The world of summer, for example, is a world of fecund imagination creating the world anew, while the world of winter is a world of “decreation” and contraction, a return to “things as they are.” We can get a radically different view of Stevens as an ecological poet, however, if we deploy a concept of environment that is more scientifically contemporary, one that foregrounds the dynamic co-implication and co-production of organism and environment in all its contingency, as highlighted in the contemporary biology of perception and cognition as we find it in figures such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In this light, the ecological dimension of Stevens’s poetry may be located in the fact that his poetics enacts the same “operating program,” with all its attendant paradoxes, of autopoietic living systems, rather than engaging in a representational relationship to what we used to call “nature.”

Chapter 14: This chapter explores advances in stage technology from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that profoundly shaped and influenced both theatrical performance and playwriting, particularly in the domain of stage lighting. Opening with the mid-twentieth-century example of Josef Svoboda, the chapter then goes back to the invention of limelight and its behind-the-scenes manipulation, which leads into a consideration of other kinds of technologically oriented off-stage labor. The discussion then turns to theatrical patents of the late nineteenth century, building on recent scholarship on backstage labor with a view to considering how scientific, technological, and theatrical work merge and often share this status of invisibility. The conclusion proposes a model for approaching and teaching theatre history based on a greater recognition of the role of technology, especially in our understanding of ‘science on stage’.