Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rewriting the Mechanic: Text, Technology, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century

Rewriting the Mechanic: Text, Technology, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century

West, Emily M.

Paperback

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Literary CriticismTechnology & EngineeringGeneral Sociology

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 13, 2026

ISBN10: 1684486114
ISBN13: 9781684486113
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Oct 13 2026
Pages: 248
Language: English

In the eighteenth century, technology didn't name a particular device or a process. It referred instead to written accounts of the mechanical arts, a now-obsolete category encompassing the wide range of work done by hand, from baking bread to building ships. Rewriting the Mechanic examines how these written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritative, and able to make speculative possibilities real--as what we now call technological. Reversing the familiar story in which literature simply reflects technological change, West draws on the work of Robert Hooke, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen to demonstrate the influence of literary techniques on ideas about masculinity, power, and the body, and how these texts helped to bring the very idea of technological modernity into being.

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