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

Clayton, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195160517 ISBN 13: 9780195160512

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

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)

Ambitious and extremely stimulating.... [Clayton's] exciting study covers a good deal of varied ground.... Clayton's book goes beyond the Victorian period to raise questions that are highly pertinent to all of us who are uncertain quite what labels we now bear―literary critics? cultural theorists? cultural historians? (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900)

About the Author:

Jay Clayton is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0195160517
• ISBN 13: 9780195160512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 284