Description:
Rewriting the Mechanic examines how written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritative, and able to make speculative possibilities real--as what we now call technological.
Review Quotes:
"Emily West's Rewriting the Mechanic is an exhilaratingly interdisciplinary deep dive into four pivotal eighteenth-century technologies of science, violence, and production (the microscope, the telescope, the gun, and the spinning jenny) that embodied futurities both artificial and real, and bodies both natural and crafted. Rewriting the Mechanic is required reading for scholars and students of body and disability studies, material culture, gender studies, and early modern literature alike."
--Deborah Needleman Armintor "author of The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature"