This chapter focuses on the atomic bomb as imagined, debated, and dissected in the fiction and criticism of the twentieth century. Long before its invention in the Manhattan Project, atomic fission was an obsessive object of speculation in fiction by writers such as H. G. Wells, Talbot Mundy, and Olaf Stapledon. Rejecting the notion that research was directed simply toward the development of clean sources of energy, such writers steered the public conversation toward the apocalyptic consequences of the employment of nuclear physics in the development of arms. Larabee focuses on how the threat of nuclear apocalypse impacted literary criticism’s sense of its social mission. Although she reads the movement known as “nuclear criticism” as a failure, she reads John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s opera Doctor Atomic as exemplary of “new critical and creative forms” that might “bring the humanities and sciences together to address threats such as nuclear weapons.”

This chapter takes on the 350-year period following Gutenberg’s invention of the hand press in Mainz around 1450. It surveys the historical precedents for Gutenberg’s movable type in China and Korea; describes the development and the uneven spread of the hand press in Europe; and investigates the social and literary impacts and potentials of the technology, contending with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s claim that the printed book “brought about” historical events such as the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Questioning any neat separation of body and machine, McDowell argues for approaches that consider the human body as an essential literary technology. Hand-printed works, she contends, are the product neither of a human or a mere tool, but the two formed into a hybrid: “neither a printing press nor a hand can produce a printed text,” McDowell argues, “but together, machine and worker can and do.”

This chapter deals with literary appropriations of navigation technologies in Early Modern England. It focuses on two kinds of compasses: those that trace circles and those that point to magnetic north. Invented in around 200 BCE in China, the magnetic compass came into use in Europe in the early thirteenth century; by the sixteenth century, metaphorical employments of navigation technologies were widespread in English literature. Barrett reads the literary engagements of John Milton, John Donne, and others with both kinds of compasses to demonstrate how the devices served both to amaze and also to reorient the colonial geographic imagination of early modern readers. As she argues, “With the era of European exploration (and its associated colonial projects), the compass became virtually synonymous, for professional pilots and laypeople alike, with navigation – and wonder.”

This chapter investigates the ways in which writers used the rapidly expanding wired networks of electrical communications technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone to reimagine notions of community, nation, and empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of electrical communication networks was motivated by, and in turn enabled, the spread of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing models of center and periphery in stark contrast with utopian predictions of global interconnection. Worth shows how telegraph and telephone wires were conceived not only as nerves connecting the globe, but also, acting as the circulatory system of Empire, as veins or arteries – “metaphorical carrier[s] not only of information but of blood.” In addition to establishing wired networks of earthly dominion, the telephone and telegraph opened imaginary connections into the uncanny and the otherworldly, seeming to transgress the boundary between life and death.

This chapter focuses on images and appropriations of computer networks in contemporary literature. Continuing the narrative of earlier chapters on compasses, steam engines, wires, and waves, this chapter explores the manner in which writers used images of networked machines to reimagine community, individuality, and the body. Ciccoricco reads fiction by William Gibson and Porpentine Charity Heartscape as serving to train its readers in the ambivalent business of navigating their own networked realities. “Just as metaphor itself relies on distance between source and target,” Ciccoricco argues, “figurations of networks are vital to the project of maintaining a critical distance from the social and political networks that we propagate and that in turn interpenetrate our experience.”

This chapter investigates the literary response to the advent of a series of technologies that operated by “waves” and “rays” – among them, wireless telegraphy, radio, X-rays, and over-the-air television. By challenging clear divisions of private and public, internal and external, urban and rural, local and global, national and international, these technologies in turn challenged writers to reimagine the body and body politic in an increasingly postdualistic world. Janechek outlines a “vibratory narrative aesthetic” in the modernist novel – one that sought not to “allegorize or simulate electronic transmission, but rather [to] take advantage of the principles already energizing it.” “No longer beholden to the representation of reality,” Janechek writes, “the novel could conceivably foster direct sensory experience, becoming a connective technology in its own right.”

This chapter begins in England in the early nineteenth century, when the printing industry, which had previously been conducted exclusively through manual labor, was rapidly mechanized through the application of steam power. It considers the major events in the industrialization of print such as the development of lithography and machine-made paper; the application of the steam engine to printing; and the worldwide distribution of books aided by steam ships and railways. Reader demonstrates that any scholarly investigation of the literary legacy of steam-driven presses must leave behind narrow disciplinary boundaries: “Literary scholars wishing to assert the importance of machine printing must necessarily place texts in relation not only to other works of literature but also to competing media: journalism, advertising, and other products of the print industry.”

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”

This chapter focuses on the literary debates provoked by the appearance of mechanical clocks – and “clockworks” more generally – in medieval England. Invented in China in the eighth century, the first European mechanical clocks were manufactured in the early fourteenth century. The contemporaneous literary record shows that clocks did not immediately impose a secular conception of time that regulated human life; instead, the population of medieval Christian Europe continued to reckon time through cycles of light and dark and according to the liturgical calendar. Drawing on readings of Christine de Pizan, Philippe de Mézières, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Lightsey argues that clocks were primarily received in the time of their invention as mechanical wonders, and primarily employed as displays of wealth.

This chapter considers the influence of emerging technologies of audio reproduction on literature. The phonograph, also called the gramophone, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison; in the form of Edison cylinders and the flat discs introduced by Emile Berliner in the 1890s, sound recording was rapidly popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Camlot traces the twofold nature of the literary engagements with sound recording: On the one hand, they “suggested a direct, unmediated experience of events from the past”; on the other, in drawing attention to the material limitations of this new technology, which “worked to shape the real-time sonic events it recorded,” these engagements “revealed how indebted our sense of reality is to mediating factors.”

This chapter explores the interpretive possibilities raised by computational visualizations of digitized literature and literary data. Taking Franco Moretti’s Maps, Graphs and Trees (2007) as a starting point, it considers what new insights these techniques of visualization, seldom employed in the humanities, can convey. Carter speaks with leading practitioners in the field to unpack the ways in which new techniques in digital data visualization are allowing scholars “to perform conventional work in new ways.” Applying these techniques to literary data for which they are not designed, however, also reveals a productive push and pull: as one of Carter’s interview subjects, Alex Christie, puts is, “We’re reading the literature on the technology, but we’re also seeing where the literature we’re trying to model pushes against the edges of the technical frameworks we have in hand.”

This chapter surveys the theory and practice of “distant reading,” the computational textual analysis of large corpora of digitized texts. Exploring descriptive, generative, and predictive modeling, Houston argues that these techniques, by “changing the scale at which texts are analyzed,” serve to “transform the object of study and thereby the kinds of questions that can be explored” in literary studies.

This chapter shifts focus from large-scale changes in the manufacture and distribution of literature to the smaller-scale manner in which a mechanical device, the typewriter, changed how literary texts were composed. Spanning the period 1860–1980 – from the invention of the typewriter to its obsolescence – this chapter investigates how the typewriter affected who wrote, what they wrote, and how they wrote it. Wershler makes the case for the typewriter as an “assemblage”: a series of technologies, techniques, and discourses that work together to shape the expressive pathways in which humans express and constitute their subjectivities.

This chapter opens the volume’s investigation of several major questions – What is technology? What is literary technology? Is literature a technology? – by responding to Walter Ong’s opposition of the naturalness of oral speech and the artificiality of “technologized” writing. It presents a historical overview of the consequences of the development of writing in the West. Considering indigenous texts by such Haida authors as Skaay and Ghandl, MacRae pushes against standard scholarly accounts of the teleological triumph of print that have served to provide “an intellectual bulwark for imperialism and colonialism.” MacRae positions orality and oral performance as rich and generative technologies whose complex affordances are impossible to render in other media: Writing and printing, he argues, “impact literature and culture” primarily “by leaving things out: gestures, colors, coughs, shouts, and murmurs, the sound of falling rain: the entire three-dimensional world of human experience.”

This chapter focuses on imaginative engagements with the steam engine in nineteenth-century literature. Following James Watt’s patent in 1781, the steam engine became an obsessive focus of literary writing, with reactions ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s denunciation of the steam-powered mechanization of the mind to Walt Whitman’s rhapsodic vision in “To a Locomotive in Winter” of the steam railway engine as “The type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent.” In the nineteenth century, the steam engine became a symbolic magnet for working through new conceptions of logic and rationality, mobility and freedom, distance and proximity, city and country, and the natural and the manmade. Kirkby shows how Victorian authors picked up the new rhythms of the steam age, also providing their readers with “psychosomatic inoculation to the impact of railway travel on the nervous system.”

This chapter covers literary representations of prostheses in a wide range of historical periods to outline the difference that literature can make in challenging the dominant technological narrative and reframing it in terms of human uses. Taking as emblematic a pair of short stories by William Faulkner (“The Leg”) and Flannery O’Connor (“Good Country People”), Hall argues that these works do more than simply register shifts in prosthetic technology, but also challenge normalizing discourses through forms that “resist any urge toward stable order, whether narrative, social, or bodily.” “Language and storytelling are important to our understanding of prosthesis,” Hall argues, “because anxieties, hopes, and fantasies about enablement, modification, and enhancement, as well as the powerful fiction of the ‘normate,’ are reinforced but also renegotiated in literary and cultural spaces.”