TY  - BOOK
AU  - Kang,Minsoo
TI  - Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination 
SN  - 9780674059412
U1  - 629.8/92094 
PY  - 2011///]
CY  - Cambridge, MA
PB  - Harvard University Press
KW  - Popular culture
KW  - History
KW  - Europe
KW  - Robotics
KW  - Popular works
KW  - Robots in art
KW  - SCIENCE / History
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Illustrations --; Introduction --; 1 The Power of the Automaton --; 2 Between Magic and Mechanics: The Automaton in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance --; 3 The Man-machine in the World-machine, 1637–1748 --; 4 From the Man-machine to the Automaton-man, 1748–1793 --; 5 The Uncanny Automaton, 1789–1833 --; 6 The Living Machines of the Industrial Age, 1833–1914 --; 7 The Revolt of the Robots, 1914–1935 --; Conclusion --; Notes --; Acknowledgments --; Index; restricted access
N2  - Kang’s central contention is that the automaton, a machine that can move by itself (better known today as the robot), is one of the essential ideas with which people in the West have pondered the very nature of humanity itself. In Kang’s telling, automata are mirrors of the ideas, fears, and anxieties of a given era, in that attitudes towards the machines have always been indicative of a moment’s zeitgeist. The book is historically sweeping, but not comprehensive; the focus is on what Kang takes to be key changes in the representations of and responses to automata. His main interest is on how Europeans in different periods of the past thought about the very notion of a self-moving machine that acted as if it were alive and how they used it for various symbolic and intellectual purposes
UR  - https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674059412?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780674059412
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780674059412/original
ER  -