Kate Foster and Molly Crozier (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation (New York: Routledge, 2026) 216pp. £116.00 Hb. £34.39 e-book. ISBN: 9781032895871
The subtitle of The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture – Cultures of Automation – is a useful shorthand for what this collection most successfully achieves. Rather than offering yet another set of essays anxiously anticipating an automated future, this volume, in terms of automation debates, works to ‘dismantle(s) [the] future-oriented gaze and places automation debates in a historical and cultural context’ (9); insisting that our fascination with, and fear of, automated systems is historically recurrent and culturally situated. In doing so, it makes a timely, conceptually sophisticated contribution to scholarship at the intersection of literature, science and technology, and sits very comfortably in Karen Raber’s series Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, alongside work in ecocriticism, critical animal studies and the new materialisms.
Foster’s substantial introduction, ‘This Time It’s (Probably Not) Different’, is itself worth assigning to students as a state-of-the-field essay on automation. It opens not with speculative fiction but with recent news: an industrial robot in a South Korean distribution centre that fatally crushes a worker it misrecognises as a box, and Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving software implicated in multiple fatal crashes. From these apparently mundane malfunctions, Foster unfolds a genealogy of ‘automation anxiety’ and ‘automation fever’, tracing how fears about job loss, bodily harm, and the erosion of human autonomy have accompanied everything from the Jacquard loom and sewing machine to high-frequency trading and large language models. One of the introduction’s most compelling interventions is to question narrow, labour-centred definitions of automation as ‘the performance by machines of tasks previously performed by humans’, arguing that such accounts assume a post-industrial, capitalist framework and neglect automata and automated systems designed as curiosities, artworks or philosophical thought experiments (3). Foster’s discussion moves deftly from Vaucanson’s eighteenth-century flautist and Jacquet-Droz’s writing automata to Ai-Da, the contemporary ‘robot artist’ whose work both troubles and relies on Jean Baudrillard’s distinction between the automaton as analogue of the human and the robot as worker. Throughout, the introduction keeps in play the racialised and colonial dimensions of automation – via Kevin LaGrandeur, Despina Kakoudaki, and the ‘whiteness of AI’ thesis of Cave and Dihal – and the politics of invisibilised labour analysed by Atanasoski and Vora’s notion of the ‘surrogate effect’.
For readers in literature and science, this framing is invaluable: it ties contemporary debates about AI and platform capitalism to longer literary and cultural histories of artificial slaves, embodied prostheses and automated knowledge. The nine chapters that follow work broadly in three overlapping clusters: historicising automation, theorising embodiment and prosthesis, and exposing the politics of race, labour and platform work.
Ben Roberts’s opening chapter, ‘“What We Need Is More Automation”: Automation Debates in the Postwar Period’, provides a media-historical anchor for the collection. Taking the BBC Horizon documentary ‘Now The Chips Are Down’ (1977) as a central case study, Roberts shows that fears of a jobless future, and the accompanying fantasies of fully automated luxury, are not unique to the present but recur with each technological wave. The chapter sits in productive tension with Foster’s claim that automation is not simply a late-capitalist issue: together they suggest that what is ‘new’ is less the technology itself than the specific alignments of state, corporate and media discourses around it. The historicising impulse extends back much further in time. Emanuele Stefanori’s essay on Augusto De Angelis’s detective novel Il Banchiere assassinato (1935) reads technology as a fully-fledged non-human actor in interwar Italian crime fiction. Stefanori argues that genre conventions ‘automatically’ generate particular plot twists, while mechanical devices take on agentive roles and human characters are rendered oddly automaton-like. The result is a subtle reframing of detective fiction as a genre that not only represents but structurally enacts automation.
Rebecca Reilly’s contribution pursues automation as a conceptual tool rather than a material reality in medieval Florentine poetry. Her chapter on Guido Cavalcanti’s automaton on the ‘threshold of life and death’ tracks how automation serves to trouble the binaries of animate/inanimate and mortal/immortal in a period when real mechanical automata were relatively rare. Vanessa Weller’s chapter, by contrast, takes us to nineteenth-century German and French literature – E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’ and Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia – to show how automata, monsters and practices of automatic writing congeal around questions of psychological disturbance, authorship and the uncanny. For BSLS readers, these pieces collectively demonstrate that ‘cultures of automation’ can be traced well before the advent of cybernetics, and that literary form is itself a site where mechanised cognition and its discontents are staged. The volume’s middle chapters turn more explicitly to questions of embodiment, prosthesis and disability. Laura Alice Chapot’s essay on computational forms in decadent short fiction by Hjalmar Söderberg and Thomas Mann reads late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetics through the lens of algorithmic and modular structures. Chapot suggests that these decadent texts anticipate contemporary discussions of ‘machine reading’ by formalising disorientation, repetition and the breakdown of linear causality.
Léon Pradeau’s ‘Prosthetic Verse: Technology, Embodiment and Disability in French Poetry (1984–2024)’ is one of the collection’s standout chapters and the one that most overtly picks up the series’ concern with ‘non-human’ bodies. Developing the concept of ‘prosthetic verse’, Pradeau shows how contemporary French poets engage with biotechnologies and disability, not merely as themes but as structuring principles that deconstruct their own lyric practices. The line between metaphorical and material prosthesis is deliberately blurred: poems enact forms of ‘self-deconstruction’ that both rely on and resist technoscientific imaginaries of bodily optimisation. While the chapter is grounded in Francophone case studies, its arguments resonate with wider work in disability studies and critical prosthetics.
The collection’s final cluster, perhaps of the greatest interest to postcolonial and race-critical work in literature and science, foregrounds the uneven distribution of automation’s benefits and harms. David Spieser-Landes’s chapter on Mounsi’s Territoire d’Outre-Ville reads the novel’s depiction of second-generation immigrant life in France as a contest between ‘French automation’ – the automatic reproduction of a narrow metropolitan Frenchness – and postcolonial agency. Automation here names not only machine processes but also cultural scripts that discipline racialised bodies. Bruno Ministro’s essay on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) offers a sharp critique of what Atanasoski and Vora call ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ (7). Through close readings of digital and experimental literature that thematises AMT, Ministro exposes how narratives of seamless automation rely upon the radical invisibilisation of crowdsourced human labour. The ‘post-literary ghosts’ of his title are the human workers who replicate the speed of digital processors for fractions of a cent. This chapter works particularly well alongside the introduction’s discussion of the Alfred Club app and the politics of not having to see the person who washes your socks. Madeleine Chalmers’s concluding chapter, ‘Bricolage, Wild Thought and the Automation of Knowledge’, brings the discussion full circle to our present moment of large language models. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage and ‘wild thought’, Chalmers argues for a more nuanced understanding of machinic cognition – one that neither demonises LLMs as harbingers of total automation nor celebrates them as frictionless tools but instead sees them as participating in longer histories of patchwork knowledge production. Molly Crozier’s brief ‘Coda’ then ties the threads together, emphasising the volume’s overall claim that anxieties and utopias surrounding automation have ‘more basis in imagination than in reality’ (13), and that literature is a privileged laboratory for working through those imaginaries.
As a whole, The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture makes several significant contributions to literature–and–science scholarship. First, it insists on a long durée view of automation that is genuinely transhistorical without lapsing into technological determinism. The range – from medieval Florence and early-modern automata to decadent fiction, twentieth-century detective novels, contemporary poetry and platform labour – is impressive, and the essays are consistently attentive to how specific media forms (the telegraph, photography, digital platforms, LLMs) reconfigure what counts as ‘automatic’. The repeated invocation of historical examples of moral panic – lamplighters striking against electric light in 1907, telegrams allegedly destroying depth of thought in 1858 – productively relativises present-day fears around AI, even as Foster and others acknowledge that ‘this time’ may be different in terms of scale and speed. Second, the volume broadens automation debates beyond the workplace without abandoning questions of labour, race and class. The chapters on prosthetic verse, decadence and the uncanny show how automation reshapes aesthetics and embodiment, while the essays on AMT, postcolonial ‘French automation’ and the racialisation of technology foreground what Foster calls ‘the historic links between automation and marginalised humans’, including enslaved and migrant workers (2). This dual focus – on form and on political economy – is exactly where literature and science as a field has the most to offer. Third, the collection models a productive dialogue between contemporary theory (Malabou, Stiegler, Atanasoski and Vora, Cave and Dihal, Korjonen-Kuusipuro and Wojchiechowski) and detailed literary readings. The introduction’s suggestion, after Malabou, that automation can be understood not only as a discourse of control but also as a potential ‘letting go’ of control, an emancipatory surrender, is picked up in different ways across the chapters: in Chapot’s exploration of disorienting decadent forms, in Pradeau’s self-deconstructing prosthetic poetics, and in Chalmers’s revaluation of LLMs as bricoleurs.
There are, inevitably, some limitations. Despite its transnational ambitions, the corpus is heavily weighted towards European (and particularly Francophone) material, with relatively little on automation in non-Western literary traditions or on, for instance, the entanglements of automation with extractive industries and environmental crisis. Given the series’ strong overlap with ecocriticism, and the clear links between automation, energy regimes and climate change, one might have wished for a chapter explicitly on automation and the Anthropocene. The focus on textually sophisticated, often elite literary forms also means that more popular genres – contemporary SF cinema, video games, fan fiction – appear largely as background rather than as primary sites of analysis.
These gaps, however, are as much invitations as shortcomings. For scholars in literature and science, the collection offers a rich conceptual toolkit – ‘prosthetic verse’, ‘French automation’, ‘artificial artificial intelligence’, automation as bricolage – that could readily be applied to other archives, from global South petrofiction to climate fiction and speculative bio-literatures. The book will be extremely useful in teaching: individual chapters could anchor seminars on posthumanism, digital humanities, or media history, while the introduction would make an excellent core reading in modules on literature and technology. The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture ultimately persuades the reader that automation is not simply a technical problem to be solved, nor a monolithic threat to ‘the human’, but a shifting cultural formation that literature has long helped to imagine, contest and re-route. For a field like literature and science, which is itself routinely asked to justify its relevance in an age of AI, this volume is a timely reminder that the ‘unruly and alive humanity that exists beyond the battery of the machines propelling us toward futurity’ (i) is not outside automation but entangled with it. It deserves a wide readership among BSLS members (and beyond) and will no doubt become a touchstone in future work on the literary cultures of automation.
Ananya Roy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
