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 1 makes the case for literature’s value to science policy and reveals how literary scholars can enter the field. With the growth of interdisciplinary policy committees, which draw on experts from all across the university and the public sphere, humanists have the opportunity to speak to urgent questions about the social implications of science. Because culture affects public attitudes toward science, policy committees need the expertise of humanists who study literature, film, myth, metaphor, and symbolic structures to strengthen their understanding of cultural influences on policy concerns. Literary study brings new archives, new methods, new approaches to scientific language, and new pedagogies to the field of public policy. Focusing on Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, the chapter shows how a novel can deepen our understanding of an important policy issue like the misguided belief in genetic determinism.

Even by Martin Delany’s uncommon standard, 1859 was an eventful year. In early May, Delany departed New York on the Mendi, a ship owned by three Liberian merchants supportive of his efforts to resettle American slaves in West Africa. In early July, he arrived with a small company in Cape Palmas and immediately began addressing crowds of Monrovians who, according to the local newspaper, packed the Methodist Episcopal Church on at least two occasions to hear him advertise “the desire of an African nationality that has brought me to these shores.”1 After one month in Liberia, Delany led an expedition some twelve hundred miles to Yoruba, searching for land in the Niger Valley on which to build a new community. By December, he had negotiated a treaty with the Alake (chief) of Abeokuta designed to establish a settlement for African American emigrants in cooperation with Egba inhabitants of the region.2 In early 1860, he departed for England to lecture and raise funds for the project.

Environmental fiction and nonfiction writers began to use secular apocalypse in the 1960s and continue to do so as the emphasis has shifted over time from scenarios of pollution and population growth to biodiversity loss and to climate change and its consequences: natural disasters, refugee crises, and increased inequality. It has sometimes been considered environmentalism’s most powerful narrative strategy. But environmental projections of apocalyptic futures in popular-scientific texts must contend with the difficulty of balancing known facts and imagined futures. Fictional portrayals of eco-apocalypse, meanwhile, often rely on narrative templates that emphasize the breakdown of civic institutions and explore changing family configurations under these circumstances. But whereas the collapse of societies is intended as a warning about possible real-live developments, it is often portrayed without any accompanying imagination of new social structures. Eco-apocalyptic narrative therefore confronts the challenges of trivialization and spectacularization, with future environmental disasters so common in fiction and film that they have lost much of their ability to inspire fear or activism. This chapter argues that apocalyptic narrative no longer has much force as a strategy of environmental communication or aesthetics. The more promising forms of eco-futurist narrative are those seeking to outline new social forms that can emerge from current ecological crisis, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.

This chapter attempts in brief to rethink the history of magic by considering its relations with otherness. Otherness is conceived of as a relative and dynamic category, generated as the necessary result of claims to truth. The long history of the term 'magic' is characterised throughout by attempts to other it. The chapter pauses on several key moments in this history, ancient and medieval, before considering in slightly more detail the consequences of the Protestant Reformation for the imposition of a modern conception of magic. The rise of science and discourses of objectivity provide impetus for the modern othering of magic, and literature’s role in this process is examined through a focus on the rise of realism. The chapter then shows how the breakdown of consensus about the nature of reality in the early twentieth century leads to new forms of artistic expression, central among which is magical realism. It argues that throughout this long history magic, in a variety of forms, has displayed an extraordinary resilience, retaining its capacity to express important aspects of experience, society and meaning.

In this chapter I take up two texts from the 1880s to demonstrate how evolutionary theory mandated formal experimentation in fiction. In both Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884 but not published until 1903), that experimentation appears most clearly in idiosyncratic narrative point of view: Schreiner narrates a section of her novel in first-person plural, while the whole of Butler’s novel is narrated in what I call first-person omniscient point of view. Arguing for a return to and reinvigoration of the study of relations between evolution and literary form inaugurated by Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s, I also broaden the scope of that study beyond Darwin. Not Darwinism but Herbert Spencer’s universalist progressivism stands behind Schreiner’s first-person plural point of view, while Butler’s narration takes shape in connection with his own peculiar brand of Lamarckism. Finally, each of these novels of the 1880s elaborates a theory of historicity derived from the same evolutionary thinking to which anomalies in point of view can be traced, a theory that requires us to interrogate the view of history encoded in the phrase ‘of the 1880s.’

This chapter provides an overview of the novel of ideas that contrasts the form with Henry James’s modernist conception of the art novel. Ian McEwan writes exemplary novels of ideas insofar as his works incorporate political, philosophical and above all scientific ideas even as they develop formal, stylistic and aesthetic complexity. After discussing Or Shall We Die? and The Ploughman’s Lunch, the chapter examines four novels: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Saturday and particularly The Child in Time. McEwan’s novels of ideas consistently explore and demonstrate unexpected capabilities of the genre. They unfold the drama and texture of their ideational content, from the level of plot device and set piece down to that of lexical units. Ideas animate but never overwhelm aesthetics. McEwan’s novels of ideas explore the capacities and capabilities of scientific inquiry and literary representation even as they ultimately reveal the limits of both.