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Motherless Creations - Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,312
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Motherless Creations - Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890 (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in
American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by
examining motherless creations: Pygmalion's statue, Frankenstein's
creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men.
These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living
systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating
life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began,
sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body.
Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined
generating life without women to control the process of
reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative
fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of
transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform
some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless
creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often
emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings,
illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers' sense of who
counts as human in fictions of artificial life.
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