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9780198792383

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Drury offers rich, thick readings that both persuade one to view these fictions in new ways and suggest possibilities for reinvigorating the practice of formal critical analysis. It is rare to find a book that offers an angle of study as boldly fresh as this one does, and it is equally satisfying to find this done so well as Drury has managed it. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice *

Drury offers rich, thick readings that both persuade one to view these fictions in new ways and suggest possibilities for reinvigorating the practice of formal critical analysis. It is rare to find a book that offers an angle of study as boldly fresh as this one does, and it is equally satisfying to find this done so well as Drury has managed it. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice * This is interrogative writing of the highest calibre; every chapter questions master narratives of the novel, barely a page goes by without an insight into the literature of the Enlightenment, and the result is a fascinating exploration of the period's narrative strategies and how they respond to technological change ... It is a stimulating approach, and will provide engaging reading for all those interested in the novel, technology, and the relationship between the two. * Chris Ewers, British Society for Literature and Science * Joseph Drury finds that the rising novel not only registered the impact of emergent mechanical technologies but also actively participated in machine labor of epistemological, social, and cultural transformation. Drury singles out popular tropes and instruments of mechanical and technical device (plot machinery, narrative vehicles) and shows how these double as self-reflexive commentary and participatory critiques of emergent knowledge forms and the scientific mechanisms that produced and promoted them. * Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature * Novel Machines stands to energize the literary history of the novel in large part because it is not limited to the familiar critiques of deleterious social and moral effects of modern convenience. * Sara Landreth, Eighteenth-Century Fiction *

Author Information

Joseph Drury is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and has published articles in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

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