Sublime Dreams of Living Machines : : The Automaton in the European Imagination / / Minsoo Kang.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: Kang, Minsoo,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2011]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (386 p.)

Kang’s central contention is that the automaton, a machine that can move by itself (better known today as the robot), is one of the essential ideas with which people in the West have pondered the very nature of humanity itself. In Kang’s telling, automata are mirrors of the ideas, fears, and anxieties of a given era, in that attitudes towards the machines have always been indicative of a moment’s zeitgeist. The book is historically sweeping, but not comprehensive; the focus is on what Kang takes to be key changes in the representations of and responses to automata. His main interest is on how Europeans in different periods of the past thought about the very notion of a self-moving machine that acted as if it were alive and how they used it for various symbolic and intellectual purposes.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1 The Power of the Automaton -- 2 Between Magic and Mechanics: The Automaton in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance -- 3 The Man-machine in the World-machine, 1637–1748 -- 4 From the Man-machine to the Automaton-man, 1748–1793 -- 5 The Uncanny Automaton, 1789–1833 -- 6 The Living Machines of the Industrial Age, 1833–1914 -- 7 The Revolt of the Robots, 1914–1935 -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index