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Networks of Improvement

Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

Networks of Improvement

Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge.

288 pages | 10 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2023

Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature

Reviews

“Richly archival and powerful in its conceptions, Mee’s Networks of Improvement boldly goes where few literary historians have been before, into the heartlands of industrializing Britain for a magisterially orchestrated and methodologically groundbreaking study. Mee has given us a picture of British intellectual and social relationships that will stand unmatched for a long time to come.”

Jon Klancher, Carnegie Mellon University

“Mee offers a sophisticated account of reading as a social practice central to the circulation of knowledge, both grand and granular, responsive to large questions with local particularities. Networks of Improvement is comprehensive, clearly written, and carefully organized.”

Jonathan Sachs, Concordia University

"A capsule review cannot do justice to Networks of Improvement. . . . The book is immensely learned and theoretically sophisticated (Bruno Latour occupies a prominent place), and it is well grounded in both primary and secondary texts and supported by extensive original research in the archives. . . . Essential."

Choice

"Be prepared to be surprised by Networks of Improvement. The early industrial revolution is not a place that conjures up images of improvement, or liberalism, or advances in medical practice. . . . Jon Mee’s immensely learned book complicates and revises our images."

Northern History

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part One: Networks and Institutions
1 Power, Knowledge, and Literature
2 The Collision of Mind with Mind: Manchester and Newcastle, 1781–1823
3 Improvement Redux: Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield, 1812–32
Part Two: Bodies and Machines
4 Three Physicians around Manchester
5 Hannah Greg’s Domestic Mission
6 An Inventive Age
7 Lives, Damned Lives, and Statistics
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Awards

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies: Oscar Kenshur Book Prize
Shortlist

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