The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface, 1850-1950

This book is about some of the ways in which the world got ready to be connected, long before the advent of electronic digital computing. Over the past hundred and fifty years, connectivity has become an end in itself: a complex, vivid, unpredictable romance woven through the enduring human desire and need for remote intimacy. Its magical enhancements are the stuff equally of tragedy, comedy, satire, elegy, lyric, melodrama, and plain description; of literature, in short. The book offers an alternative view of writing in Britain from George Eliot to D.H. Lawrence, Hope Mirrlees, and Katherine Mansfield, and a series of case-studies designed to open the topic up for further enquiry.