Rumors Of War And Infernal Machines

Author : Charles E. Gannon
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780742540354
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rumors of War and Infernal Machines written by Charles E. Gannon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and unique work reveals the remarkably influential role of futuristic literature on contemporary political power in America. Tracing this phenomenon from its roots in Victorian Britain, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines offers a fascinating exploration of how fictional speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies profoundly influence the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. Gannon convincingly demonstrates that military fiction anticipated and even influenced the evolution of the tank, the development of the airplane, and also the bitter political battles within Britain's War Office and the Admiralty. In the United States, future-fictions and Cold-War thrillers were an officially acknowledged factor in the Pentagon's research and development agendas, and often gave rise_and shape_to the nation's strategic development of technologies as diverse as automation, atomic weaponry, aerospace vehicles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars'). His book reveals a striking relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technocentric ideologies. With its detailed political, historical, and literary analysis of U.S. and British fascination with hi-tech warfare, this lively and revealing study will appeal to students, literary and cultural scholars, military and history enthusiasts, and general readers.

Author : Charles E. Gannon
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN 13 : 0742568717
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rumors of War and Infernal Machines written by Charles E. Gannon and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2005-08-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and unique work reveals the remarkably influential role of futuristic literature on contemporary political power in America. Tracing this phenomenon from its roots in Victorian Britain, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines offers a fascinating exploration of how fictional speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies profoundly influence the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. Gannon convincingly demonstrates that military fiction anticipated and even influenced the evolution of the tank, the development of the airplane, and also the bitter political battles within Britain's War Office and the Admiralty. In the United States, future-fictions and Cold-War thrillers were an officially acknowledged factor in the Pentagon's research and development agendas, and often gave rise_and shape_to the nation's strategic development of technologies as diverse as automation, atomic weaponry, aerospace vehicles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars'). His book reveals a striking relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technocentric ideologies. With its detailed political, historical, and literary analysis of U.S. and British fascination with hi-tech warfare, this lively and revealing study will appeal to students, literary and cultural scholars, military and history enthusiasts, and general readers.

Author : Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812204670
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Divine Art, Infernal Machine written by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-01-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's one-time business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The association is not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the most part, however, it was welcomed as a "divine art" by Western churchmen and statesmen. Sixteenth-century Lutherans hailed it for emancipating Germans from papal rule, and seventeenth-century English radicals viewed it as a weapon against bishops and kings. While an early colonial governor of Virginia thanked God for the absence of printing in his colony, a century later, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic paid tribute to Gutenberg for setting in motion an irreversible movement that undermined the rule of priests and kings. Yet scholars continued to praise printing as a peaceful art. They celebrated the advancement of learning while expressing concern about information overload. In Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Eisenstein, author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, has written a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related. Always keeping an eye on the present, she recalls how, in the nineteenth century, the steam press was seen both as a giant engine of progress and as signaling the end of a golden age. Predictions that the newspaper would supersede the book proved to be false, and Eisenstein is equally skeptical of pronouncements of the supersession of print by the digital. The use of print has always entailed ambivalence about serving the muses as opposed to profiting from the marketing of commodities. Somewhat newer is the tension between the perceived need to preserve an ever-increasing mass of texts against the very real space and resource constraints of bricks-and-mortar libraries. Whatever the multimedia future may hold, Eisenstein notes, our attitudes toward print will never be monolithic. For now, however, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.

Author : David Seed
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 184631755X
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Future Wars written by David Seed and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book investigates fiction that speculates about wars likely to break out in the near or distant future. Ranging widely across periods and conflicts real and imagined, Future Wars explores the interplay between politics, literature, science fiction, and war in a range of classic texts. Individual essays look at Reagan's infamous “Star Wars” project, nuclear fiction, Martian invasion, and the Pax Americana. The use of future war scenarios in military planning dates back to the nineteenth century, and Future Wars concludes with a US Army officer's assessment of the continuing usefulness of future wars fiction.

Author : Peter J. Beck
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474229891
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The War of the Worlds written by Peter J. Beck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1897, H.G. Wells's alien invasion narrative The War of the Worlds was a landmark work of science fiction and one that continues to be adapted and referenced in the 21st century. Chronicling the novel's contexts, its origins and its many multi-media adaptations, this book is a complete biography of the life – and the afterlives – of The War of the Worlds. Exploring the original text's compelling sense of place and vivid recreation of Wells's Woking home and the concerns of fin-de-siécle Britain, the book goes on to chart the novel's immediate international impact. Starting with the initial serialisations in US newspapers, Peter Beck goes on to examine Orson Welles's legendary 1938 radio adaptation, TV and film adaptations from George Pal to Steven Spielberg, Jeff Wayne's rock opera and the numerous other works that have taken their inspiration from Wells's original. Drawing on new archival research, this is a comprehensive account of the continuing impact of The War of the Worlds.

Author : Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher : Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN 13 : 9781558496514
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War Stars written by Howard Bruce Franklin and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon -- guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals -- has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

Author : Deborah Cowen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415956935
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War, Citizenship, Territory written by Deborah Cowen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features 19 chapters that look at the impact of war and militarism on citizenship, whether traditional territorially-bound national citizenship or "transnational" citizenship. This text sets forth a geopolitically based theory of war's transformative role on contemporary forms of citizenship and territoriality.

Author : Duncan Bell
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691151164
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Idea of Greater Britain written by Duncan Bell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the tumultuous closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the prospect of democracy loomed and as intensified global economic and strategic competition reshaped the political imagination, British thinkers grappled with the question of how best to organize the empire. Many found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain, a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and southern Africa. In The Idea of Greater Britain, Duncan Bell analyzes this fertile yet neglected debate, examining how a wide range of thinkers conceived of this vast "Anglo-Saxon" political community. Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious--creating a globe-spanning nation-state--to the practical and mundane--reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. But all of these ideas were motivated by the disquiet generated by democracy, by challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global cooperation and communication that anticipated today's globalization debates. Exploring attitudes toward the state, race, space, nationality, and empire, as well as highlighting the vital theoretical functions played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, Bell illuminates important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.

Author : Nader Elhefnawy
Publisher : Nader Elhefnawy
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Download or read book After the New Wave written by Nader Elhefnawy and published by Nader Elhefnawy. This book was released on 2015-07-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY is a revised and updated version of AFTER THE NEW WAVE, Nader Elhefnawy's earlier collection of essays on science fiction.

Author : José Vicente Herrero Pérez
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 331954747X
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Spanish Military and Warfare from 1899 to the Civil War written by José Vicente Herrero Pérez and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the attitudes of the Spanish army officer corps towards the evolution of warfare during the early decades of the twentieth century, and their influence on the armies of the Spanish Civil War. It examines how the Spanish military coped with technological innovations such as the machine gun and the tank, how it adapted the army ́s battlefield doctrine to changes in warfare before the Civil War, and the influence of this doctrine on the outcome of the conflict. Of the different armed forces that fought in the Spanish Civil War, it is paradoxically the Spanish army that remains most forgotten - especially its military doctrine. Scholarship on the Spanish military in this period focuses on its politics, ideology and institutional reforms, touching upon 'hard' professional issues only superficially, if at all. Based on original research and using largely unstudied Spanish primary sources, this book fills a major scholarly gap in the history of the Spanish army and the Spanish Civil War.