Professor Drury on Brit Lit and Tech

 

Professor Joseph Drury wrote the afterword for a recently published collection of essays, British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830. The afterword, “On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa,” takes the essays in the collection as an occasion to reflect on what literary scholars can learn from the history of technology and what historians of technology can learn from literary studies (per Drury, it "kind of does what the title suggests"). It argues that the history of technology provides valuable models and terminology for thinking about the uses of literary forms and that literary studies can provide historians with insight into the cultural meanings and imagined uses of technologies, both of which can have a significant impact on their actual development in the real world.