Perspectives on technology in eighteenth-century encyclopedias, travel literature, and utopian fiction

The topic of mechanical arts and technology had a much broader range of cultural and literary significance in the eighteenth century than the general nineteenth-century disinterest or the twentieth-century distrust of the technical by many literary and intellectual figures. Selected examples from eighteenth-century genres of expository prose, travel literature, and utopian fiction indicate how perspectives on technology evolved from undifferentiated visions to highly elaborate conceptions which influenced cultural definitions, traveler perceptions, and literary images.; A mixed discourse on mechanical arts, invention, and fantastic machinery developed into formal definitions of technology used to promote an agenda of social improvement from Johann Joachim Becher, Jonathan Swift, the encyclopedias of Johann Heinrich Zedler and Denis Diderot, and Johann Beckmann. The social goals of travel are diminished in favor of a national pride in technical advances and a utilitarian concept of culture in the travel instructions and travel reports of Daniel Defoe, Josiah Tucker, and Beckmann. Carl Gottlob Cramer in Erasmus Schleicher represents these ideals in fiction when a traveling mechanic defines his moral superiority by technical abilities. The practice of traveling with measuring instruments extended technological perspectives. Friedrich Nicolai, Georg Forster, and Alexander von Humboldt used concepts of technology to evaluate levels of achievement between different cultures. Technical perspectives were internalized and applied by travel writers and novelists to many objects, natural and artificial. Images of cities and descriptions of volcanoes are used as case studies of constructed and natural landscapes where mechanical metaphor explained complex structures. Examples are from the encyclopedias and travel narratives as well as Carl Ignaz Geiger, Philipp Balthasar Sinold, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Gottfried August Burger.; The popularity of the technology theme during the last decades of the eighteenth century shows it was seen as a valuable tool for the reform of society. When technology is taken up as a literary topic in utopian science fiction and in dystopian criticisms of the technical later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it had acquired much different connotations from the historical context of the eighteenth century.