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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.
Women Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that
appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830:
the woman warrior. The term itself, "woman warrior," refers to
quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long
contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers
ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on
occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior
is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality
of women's participation in select scenes of the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the
woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges,
Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Gunderrode, and Mary Robinson)
to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This
project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage
simulates the public world that female dramatists and their
warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the
realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage,
they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine
dramas in the context of their performance and production histories
in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women
warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas
about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument
for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because
the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke
consideration about women's place in society. Consequently, where
we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues,
farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points
to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies
made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who
battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare
male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers'
dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the
difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors
seriously resembles women writers' struggles to enter the
ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere. Published
by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers
University Press.
For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a
celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among
the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension
about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering
threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion
in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that
propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of
essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical
imitations of life. Recent scholarship in post-humanism,
post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism,
eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected
the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and
thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other
Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new
methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with
technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant
organic life. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed
worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Â
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