A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in
Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.
Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic
mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism,
Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial
Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of
Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical,
and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their
circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a
project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s
emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of
machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the
digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the
Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how
writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these
industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one
where local literary and philosophical societies served as
important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge.
General
Imprint: |
University of Chicago Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
Firstpublished: |
2023 |
Authors: |
Jon Mee
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
288 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-226-82838-1 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-226-82838-7 |
Barcode: |
9780226828381 |
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