It is during the nineteenth century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book opens with Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and ends in the trenches of the First World War.

The overall orientation of the essays is literary and historical but they also touch on philosophy, mathematics, natural history, the history of medicine and psychiatry, computer science, and virtual reality. Tracking the cultural impact of new technologies in the long nineteenth century, the book explores how the machine shifts our conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, man/machine boundaries, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences. Taken together, the essays expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

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