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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Jailbreakers, Villains, And Vampires: Representations Of Criminality In Early-Victorian Popular Texts, Elizabeth Fay Stearns
Jailbreakers, Villains, And Vampires: Representations Of Criminality In Early-Victorian Popular Texts, Elizabeth Fay Stearns
English - Dissertations
In Jailbreakers, Villains, and Vampires: Representations of Criminality in Early-Victorian Popular Texts, I analyze moments of discursive dissonance that emerge through the juxtaposition of early-Victorian theories of criminality and representations of criminals in popular culture. In the 1830s and 1840s in England, methods for managing criminals underwent a series of revisions that corresponded to shifts in prevailing theories about the nature and course of criminal behavior. Assumptions that criminality was volitional, or that it originated in an individual's deficient self-discipline, gradually shifted into perceptions that criminality was pathological, and that malefactors were naturally brutish and incorrigible. Predominant conceptions of …
The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, And Mechanized Bodies In Victorian Culture, Jessica Kuskey
The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, And Mechanized Bodies In Victorian Culture, Jessica Kuskey
English - Dissertations
While recent scholarship focuses on the fluidity or dissolution of the boundary between body and machine, "The Body Machinic" historicizes the emergence of the categories of "human" and "mechanical" labor. Beginning with nineteenth-century debates about the mechanized labor process, these categories became defined in opposition to each other, providing the ideological foundation for a dichotomy that continues to structure thinking about our relation to technology. These perspectives are polarized into technophobic fears of dehumanization and machines "taking over," or technological determinist celebrations of new technologies as improvements to human life, offering the tempting promise of maximizing human efficiency. "The Body …