@inbook{4fd47e291fa54dbd81964e7f4828a85b,
title = "The Mechanical Wedding: Some Robotic Engagements in 19th-Century American Culture",
abstract = "This chapter addresses aspects of the robot as conceived in American culture during the middle third of the 19th century. With industrialization increasingly marking life and work during these decades, so creative literature, popular culture, and political, social and cultural criticism portrayed the associated human-machine interactions in a variety of ways, particularly in relation to the factory and its regimes of production. Exploring these mechanical weddings as imagined by Herman Melville among other writers, the chapter argues that mid-19th century utopian and dystopian speculations about steam-and machine-men (and women), automata, thinking machines, and other such robotic variants drew on ancient and pre-modern myth and religion as much as on scientific theory, laboratory experiment and more recent home-grown experience. In spite of this, whether they were optative or cautionary such early industrial speculations about human-machine engagements also rehearsed issues (not least political ones) that remain salient to discussions of the robot in the post-industrial United States.",
keywords = "American Studies, culture, technology, David Nye, Herman Melville",
author = "Dale Carter",
note = "The General Editor of the European Views of the United States series is Professor Emeritus Hans J{\"u}rgen Grabbe (Martin-Luther-Universit{\"a}t Halle-Wittenberg)",
year = "2021",
month = dec,
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-8253-4906-6",
series = "European Views of the United States",
publisher = "Universit{\"a}tsverlag Winter",
pages = "11--23",
editor = "J{\o}rn Br{\o}ndal and Anne M{\o}rk and Rasmussen, {Kasper Grotle}",
booktitle = "Transatlantic Currents",
}