Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture

by Jay Clayton

Overview

Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture—from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures—Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville—meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Hélène Cixous, Alfonso Cuarón, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195313260
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	09/28/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jay Clayton is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Editorial Reviews

"Comprising a dazzling array of textual readings, ranging from contemporary novels to films to hypertexts, Clayton maps a new theoretical approach...he offers a model for a historical cultural studies that opens a path out of the quagmire in which the field often finds itself today...Clayton's book offers the theoretical breakthrough for which many scholars have been waiting...This impressive and challenging work is a must-read for any scholar interested in cultural studies. It should not be overlooked."—Postmillenial Victorian Studies

"This is the really cheering and impressive thing about his book, Professor Clayton is clearly a "believer" when it comes to the marriage of history, cultural studies and postmodernism. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace is not a primer or a polemical work, but something richer and rarer: a work that itself embodies the ideals expressed by its author. ...it will come to be seen as an important work... And, as befits a book skeptical of intellectual labels and so generous in its approach to differnt disciplines, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace will repay the attention of anybody with an interest in the nineteenth century."—Dickens Quarterly

"In his highly original and somewhat unconventional new book, Jay Clayton calls for a cultural studies that foregrounds historical inquiry.... [A] brilliantly argued, thoroughly researched, and highly original book.... It makes a significant contribution to an emergent strain in cultural-studies discourse, helps launch and sustain a mode of inquiry that is crucial to our cultural future, one that we as humanists cannot afford to ignore."—Victorian Studies

"It has the buzz of intellectual excitement at a comparatively new juncture in cultural studies.... And, as befits a book so skeptical of intellectual labels and so generous in its approach to different disciplines, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace will repay the attention of anybody with an interest in the nineteenth century."—Dickens Quarterly

"This is a wonderful book. Jay Clayton moves deftly between the Victorian era and the present day, between literature and science, popular culture and post-modern thinkers. This important study raises some profound questions about the relationship between literary study and cultural theory, and will ensure that all of us who consider ourselves cultural historians will ponder deeply about the implications of our practices."—Kate Flint, Rutgers University

"In this landmark study, postmodernity's final break with the Enlightenment is prefigured across the uneven disciplinary development of nineteenth-century technoculture, from telegraphy and automata through Darwinian anticipations of 'genome time.' Anchored in a brimming crosscurrent of literary detail and buoyed by a venturesome narrative prose of its own, this blithely original book defends the explanatory powers of lived anachronism against the death-of-history school. Resisting utopian futurism in his broad new program for cultural studies, Clayton has achieved in the process a work of utopian historicism. The Victorian moment is ours again."—Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa

From the Publisher