Review of Alex Wetmore’s ‘Sympathy Machines: Men of Feeling and the Automaton’

摘要

While it has long been established that in the eighteenth century models of femininity were often grounded in mechanical analogies, Wetmore.s wide-ranging article of several – but fluidly connected – parts crosses traditional disciplinary divisions between eighteenth-century literature, moral philosophy and popular culture to argue that the "connection between sensitive men and machines" (39) highlights a significant movement from the earlier association of technological developments with self-interest