Overview
Automation is everywhere: in the supermarket, in home appliances, and on our commutes. While we worry about what automation means for human autonomy now, human societies have long wondered about their replacement by machines. The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture explores the pervasive – and long-standing – influence of automation on humanity by dismantling the prevalent future-oriented perspective of many automation debates. This collection examines how literature has conceptualized automation over centuries, from utopian visions of a world liberated from work and domestic labour to dystopian futures in which humans are surplus to requirements. We set out social and industrial developments which feed into discourses of automation and its mediation in literary cultures. By bringing together theoretical approaches to real-world automation with readings of its literary interpretations, this volume demonstrates literature’s role as a space for hypothesizing alternate realities, making clear literature’s propensity to inform our attitudes to real-world phenomena.
Full Product Details
Author: Kate Foster ,
Molly Crozier
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.560kg
ISBN: 9781032895871
ISBN 10: 103289587
Pages: 204
Publication Date: 29 September 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Not yet available
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Reviews
The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture highlights relationships between human agency and automation in literary imaginations. Its investigation of poetics and poetic production offers fresh insight into the value of the unruly and alive humanity that exists beyond the battery of the machines propelling us toward futurity. -Saba Syed Razvi, Associate Professor English and Creative Writing, University of Houston-Victoria, USA
""The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture highlights relationships between human agency and automation in literary imaginations. Its investigation of poetics and poetic production offers fresh insight into the value of the unruly and alive humanity that exists beyond the battery of the machines propelling us toward futurity."" -Saba Syed Razvi, Associate Professor English and Creative Writing, University of Houston-Victoria, USA ""The range – from medieval Florence and early-modern automata to decadent fiction, twentieth-century detective novels, contemporary poetry and platform labour – is impressive, and the essays are consistently attentive to how specific media forms (the telegraph, photography, digital platforms, LLMs) reconfigure what counts as ‘automatic’. The repeated invocation of historical examples of moral panic – lamplighters striking against electric light in 1907, telegrams allegedly destroying depth of thought in 1858 – productively relativises present-day fears around AI, even as Foster and others acknowledge that ‘this time’ may be different in terms of scale and speed."" Read ""Foster, Kate and Crozier, Molly (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation"" published by The British Society for Literature and Science.
Author Information
Kate Foster is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on intersections of human bodies and technology in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultures. She is working on a monograph on fictional androids and cyborgs, and developing a new project on technology, disease and cultural history. Molly Crozier is an early career researcher in French and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on embodiment, gender and disability in twentieth-century theatre. She is working on a monograph on disability in Samuel Beckett’s drama. She holds an honorary fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.
