Networks of Improvement - Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

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
First published:	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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