Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of
literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture
and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying
a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists
from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed
circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles
Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer,
Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life
and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from
comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the
process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that
postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the
nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in
the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles
Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen,
Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada
Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a
lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear,
Peter Carey, Helene Cixous, Alfonso Cuaron, William Gibson, Donna
Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott,
Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard.
The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a
new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras
share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that
has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling
and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own
practice the value of a self-reflectivestance toward cultural
history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points
of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational
nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and
urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to
shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.
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