The rail, the body and the pen: essays on travel, medicine and technology in 19th century British literature

"Many of the best-known British authors of the 1800s were fascinated by the science and technology of their era. Dickens included spontaneous human combustion and "mesmerism" (hyptnotism) in his plots. Mary Shelley created the immortal Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his creature. H.G. Wells imagined the Time Machine, the Invisible Man, and invaders from Mars. Percy Shelley was as infamous at Oxford for his smelly experiments and for his atheism. This book of essays explores representations of technology in the work of various nineteenth-century British authors. Essays cluster around two important areas of innovation-- transportation and medicine. Each essay contributor accessibly maps out the places where art and science meet, detailing how these authors both affected and reflected the technological revolutions of their time"--

Part 1: Trains and travel -- Trains and Brains: Splitting the Self in Sensation Fiction / Richard Leahy -- A Technological View of Nineteenth Century Imperialism and Globalization in Science Fiction and Global History / Sobia Kiran -- The Shock of Modernity: Traveling the Railways and Reading the First Female Detective(s) / Chandrama Basu -- Strains, Gains and Remains: Railway Development and Victorian Women in Middlemarch, North and South and Tess of the D'Urbervilles / Zoë Perot -- Part 2: Medicine and the Body -- Factory Time: Mechanization and Monotony in the Victorian Imagination / Susan Johnston -- H.G. Wells and the Machinery of the Brain: Cognition Beyond Skull and Skin in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds / O.R. Teregulova -- The Mechanics of Being Human: Technology and Posthumanism in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein / Urshela Wiggins Atkins -- Reanimation Through Electro-Stimulation: Frankenstein and Electrical Science / Vittoria S. Rubino -- Lubing the Speculum: Carmilla and the Gradual Introduction of Diagnostic Technology to Victorian Medicine / Elizabeth Hornsey -- "Stiff Limbed" and "Doubly Souled": The Queer Anatomy of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book / Shelley Rees -- "The Intolerable Kodak": Ouida on Victorian Celebrity Culture / Lorraine Dubuisson