The automaton, known today as the robot, can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. Chapters include examinations of Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass nature, the Cartesian mind/body divide, automata as objects of courtly desire, the uncanny Olympia, and the revolutionary Robots in post-WWI drama.

Shows how the scientific question, 'Are we automata?', was addressed in late nineteenth-century literature and the arts.

Drawing on the author’s two decades of seeing, writing on, and teaching about puppetry from a critical perspective, this book offers a collection of insights into how we watch, understand, and appreciate puppetry. Reading the Puppet Stage uses examples from a broad range of puppetry genres, from Broadway shows and the Muppets to the rich field of international contemporary performing object experimentation to the wealth of Asian puppet traditions, as it illustrates the ways performing objects can create and structure meaning and the dramaturgical interplay between puppets, performers, and language onstage. An introductory approach for students, critics, and artists, this book underlines where significant artistic concerns lie in puppetry and outlines the supportive networks and resources that shape the community of those who make, watch, and love this ever-developing art.

​This project is the first to explore how Bernard Shaw intersects constructively with automata, robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Shaw was born in the golden age of the automaton. His Bible on the Life Force and Creative Evolution, Back to Methuselah, was written when Karel and Josef Čapek coined the word “robot.” Shaw’s life ran in parallel with the rise of AI, and the big names in AI were his contemporaries. Moreover, empirical analyses of Shavian texts and images using AI uncovers possibilities for new interpretations, demonstrating how future renditions of his works may make use of these advanced technologies to broaden Shaw’s audience, readership and scholarship.

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This trans-historical collection explores analogue performance technologies from Ancient Greece to pre-Second World War. From ancient mechanical elephants to early modern automata, Enlightenment electrical experiments to Victorian spectral illusions, this volume offers an original examination of the precursors of contemporary digital performance.

This collection brings together current research on topics that are perennially important to Romantic studies: the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the landscape and history of his native Switzerland.