Coda

By the early nineteenth century, criticism of the modern novel was being linked to broader critiques of ‘the machine’, a new abstraction that denoted the entire sociotechnical complex rather than any specific device or class of devices. This Romantic concept would go on to shape modern critiques of modern technology by Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault, as well as New Historicist approaches to the machinery of the novel. But just as Carlyle’s attack on the ‘Age of Machinery’ overlooked the complexity of Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment, so Coleridge’s critique of the technology of the modern novel ignored its formal sophistication and its diverse modes of mediation. Anticipating Herbert Marcuse’s more optimistic approach to technology as the necessary foundation of any project of political liberation, however, William Godwin kept the Enlightenment’s constructivist approach to the novel’s technologies alive by trying to activate what he saw as their latent potential as instruments of radical reform.