The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology - (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850) by Michele Speitz

Book Synopsis

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

In this book Michele Speitz assembles the first full-length scholarly study of the British Romantic technological sublime, addressing a significant gap in scholarship on Romantic literature, technological aesthetics, and the history of science and technology. Speitz shows that it is through a study of technology, and by putting British Romanticism's representations of sublime nature and technology in dialogue, that the broader history and present-day implications of the British Romantic sublime can best be understood.

This innovative study foregrounds representations of Romantic machines and tools both aged and new: from the lever and the teacup to modern marvels including the steam engine and the seismograph. Surveyed as well are built environments and vast mechanical and infrastructural systems: mines, canal works, roadways, modern suspension bridges. By grouping together this set of ancient and novel inventions -- sourced from accounts penned by Erasmus Darwin, John Keats, Anna Seward, Robert Southey, Mary Godwin Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and more -- Speitz demonstrates how a comparative study of these technologies relative to their aesthetic presentation and reception uncovers an overlooked iteration of the Romantic sublime, one that reveals fresh accounts of Romantic nature that have a bearing on twenty-first-century debates about the environment. The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology is essential reading for literary and aesthetic theorists, historians of science and technology, literary and art historians, and scholars of ecocriticism and literature and the environment.

Review Quotes

"A rich contribution to our understanding of Romantic poetry, its technological imaginary and the aesthetics of the sublime that created ambivalent perceptions of shared, therefore never fully controlled, agency among nature, machines, and humanity. The book's main argument about the technological, material, and infrastructural sublimes is powerful, and its readings of the poetry of technē superbly nuanced. Plus, wait for Speitz's piercing insight near the end on the 'inexorable intimacy' of the poets' baring of human limitations and open-ended vulnerability in near relations with the technological sublime. It surprised me, and left me utterly persuaded." Professor Alan Liu, University of Santa Barbara, California

"Michele Speitz offers a compelling and timely expansion of our understanding of the Romantic sublime to encompass the fascination and fear engendered by new technologies. The book offers an important genealogical account of the concept of technology as both continuous with pre-industrial innovations in machinery and engineering and as anticipating the post-industrial developments with which we are all contending today. The counterintuitive, original, and compelling insight of The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology is that the category of nature--so central to Romantic era literature and to the disciplinary history of Romanticism itself--needs to be understood as arising in conjunction, and in dynamic interdependence with remarkable and unnerving technological changes. Through original interpretations of key figures including Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley, Speitz tracks an anti-Promethean counter-plot within Romanticism that ought to unsettle received ideas of how writers and thinkers of the period grappled with the limits of human ingenuity and invention, and imagined the cultural collaboration of art with science." Professor Nancy Yousef, Rutgers University

"This book crucially unites literature with mechanical and civil engineering. Expertly building on work by Leo Marx, Perry Miller, and David E. Nye on the technological sublime, Speitz provides a compelling narrative. Discussing Romantic poets including Keats, Shelley, and Southey, Speitz argues for an appreciation of the similarity between the endeavors of writers and engineers." Professor John Gardner, Anglia Ruskin University