Michelle Speitz, The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024) 216 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781835536704
In The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology, Michelle Speitz ‘offers the first full-length study of the sublime stories British Romantic writers told about technology’ (p. 1). This is a welcome and original study, casting new light on the technological imaginations of writers we might be more accustomed to associate with untamed nature than cogs and gears. Speitz interprets ‘technology’ broadly, from teacups and levers to engines, canals, and suspension bridges. Her cast of writers is refreshingly mixed too, featuring canonical poets like P. B. Shelley and John Keats, lesser-discussed figures like Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, and Anna Seward, and even the renowned engineer Thomas Telford.
Speitz argues persuasively that to understand Romantic writers’ responses to the natural world, ‘we must inquire into the intensity of their feelings for inventions, technologies, machines and tools’ (p. 2). A core claim is that ‘deeper understandings of technological aesthetics grant access to deeper understandings of humanity’s relationships with nature’ (p. 2). The book draws from a wide range of theories of the sublime, from Longinus and Burke to modern day critics such as Cian Duffy and Philip Shaw. Importantly, Speitz recognises that Romantic-era writing often valorised ‘genius scientists and inventors’ alongside ‘revolutionaries, war heroes, and genius poets’ (p. 4).
One especially striking example is Southey’s friendship with Telford, the engineer responsible for some of the most ambitious infrastructural works of the age. Speitz notes that Southey not only travelled with Telford, but styled him as sublime — a figure expanding imperial commerce by overcoming ‘great engineering challenges posed by the natural world’ (p. 4). The book is full of such illuminating detail. As Speitz puts it, grasping how Romantic writers portray both nature and technology as sublime — ‘simultaneously awe-inspiring and unnerving’ — dissolves ‘presumed gulfs between nature and culture’ and unsettles fantasies of ‘humanity’s self-reliance’ (p. 15). This elegant formulation captures the project’s intellectual reach.
Chapter one juxtaposes the well-known myth of Prometheus with the less familiar story of Trophonius. There are various versions of the myth but, in some, Trophonius is a son of Apollo; he and his brother Agamedes were legendary architects, who stole from a king after building him a treasure chamber after leaving one brick loose in the wall. Trophonius was forced to kill his brother in the building they had created, and then he was swallowed by the earth to live forever underground as an oracle. Thereafter, those who visited him to receive prophecies would return changed, transformed by their encounter. Speitz considers the myth in Erasmus Darwin’s writings, with intriguing attention to word choices such as ‘ponderous’ in Darwin and Seward. A counterpoint is provided by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that ‘modern Prometheus’, whose monstrous creation is read through the sublime’s lens of both awe and terror.
Subsequent chapters adopt a case study model, ‘each engaging inventions of a different type, scale, and significance’ (p. 18). Chapter two, ‘The Seismograph and a Keatsian “Material Sublime”’, draws on Keats’s own phrasing to explore how poets and philosophers like Kant, Keats, and Shelley imagined poetry and technology as similarly powerful — ambivalent, uncontrolled forces. Both, Speitz argues, are ‘never fully harnessed nor corralled by human hands’ (p. 67).
This chapter offers a welcome reminder that the Romantics were not disengaged from contemporary invention. Shelley in particular was immersed in technological experimentation. As Speitz notes, he worked ‘surrounded by nuts and bolts, tools and gadgets’ and even became financially involved in Henry Reveley’s steamboat project (p. 85). Speitz asserts that for Shelley, ‘invention, creation, and making are always both ideological and material, born of nature and mind, culture and history’ — what she calls ‘a tangled nexus’ (p. 88). The chapter closes by connecting Shelley’s critique of solipsistic creativity with his broader anxieties about technological power: ‘when we make, invent, and manifest world in accord with our own solipsistic visions […] then we ourselves and what we create are necessarily benighted and bankrupt’ (p. 97).
Chapter three, on ‘Lyres, Levers, Boats and Steam’ further explores Shelley’s ‘technologies of sublime correspondence’. Both poetry and machines, Speitz argues, hold the power to uplift or to threaten. She writes that ‘the vexed discourse of the sublime becomes a resource for Shelley, allowing him to showcase the transformative promise and peril he attributes to machinery and poetry alike’ (p. 104). Occasionally, the style can become a little over-animated. Shelley is said to invite us ‘to take a bath in the aesthetic pleasure of the sublime, lofty, uplifting verse’ (p. 91), and I worry that there might be some overreach in arguing that the lever — though never actually mentioned by Shelley — still possesses meaningful ‘absent presence’ (p. 109). Still, the core argument, that poetic and technological creation in Shelley’s work are often structurally and thematically aligned, is convincing and rewarding.
The final chapter, ‘Suspension Bridges, Modern Canals, and the Infrastructural Sublime’ turns to Telford’s monumental works. These new infrastructures, Speitz argues, rivalled the most quasi-metaphysical of sublime projects and embodied the imperial desire to master impassable landscapes. Telford’s roads, canals, and bridges become icons of an infrastructural sublime. In Speitz’s account, the very scale and daring of these constructions reflect Romanticism’s own anxieties about mastery, futurity, and human limitation.
From myth and poetry to metallurgy and empire, this book covers impressive terrain. The book is rich in detail and full of insight about the intimate entanglements between literature, aesthetics, and technology in the Romantic period. It reminds us that the sublime was never simply about distant mountains or raging seas but could be found in the noise of a new machine or the span of a bridge. The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology more than makes its case. In showing how Romantic writers viewed technology not as the antithesis of nature but as something equally sublime — awe-filled, dangerous, and transformative — Speitz reframes our understanding of both Romanticism and the technological imagination.
Sharon Ruston, Lancaster University
