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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

modernist machines, racial identity, British poetry, scientific views

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

Literary studies continually shape and reshape the study of historical time-periods. With a fascination on how aesthetic objects—specifically literature—becomes a vantage point through which to see a bygone age, I began my ORCA project with the hopes to better understand the relationship between eighteenth-century British poetry and the scientific paradigms of Newton and Leibniz. Wanting to explore how poets during this time distilled and also complicated the contemporary scientific views, I excitedly delved into the poetry of Alexander Pope and James Thomson. However, as I began this project I simultaneously began to narrow down my personal field of interests in preparation for graduate school, leading me to focus on American literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In order to wed my interests in discussions concerning science and American literature, I determined to study literary representations of technology in American literature. With this decision, I basically transported the framework for my ORCA project and placed it into a different the nation and time period.

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