624 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE is a staple ofcomic books and science fiction produced for ajuvenile audience willing to accept cardboard characterizations of the scien tist as a heroic explorer. By contrast, the scientist as idealist appears in works destined for a more mature and socially aware audience. This scientist, motivated by idealistic or utopian visions, is a socially conscious individual, critical of his profession and willing to modify scientific research for the public good. He is usually encountered in the higher levels of literary production and not in popular books, movies, and television shows. Except for the last two depictions, the stereotypes outlined above disclose ambiguous individuals who, if not always sinister and dan gerous, are nevertheless engaged in activities ultimately harmful to society. Whatever their ultimate aims, all of the stereotypical scien tists are male. Apart from Marie Curie, it is difficult to recall another female scientist, real or fictional, familiar to a wide audience. Haynes has adopted a chronological approach in her analysis of the six stereotypes. This raises some problems in her discussion of the early period, when a small number of individuals pursued scien tific interests. Therefore, Haynes fills her early chapters with ex tended accounts of the history of science. Unfortunately, this is a canned history ofscience, and one marred by errors offact and inter pretation. If the historian of science is troubled by these accounts, the historian of technology will wish that the author offered a more sophisticated treatment of the relationship between science, tech nology, and industry. These criticisms aside, however, readers of this book will discover many new interpretations of familiar scientific figures, and a host ofnew novels, plays, and poems that feature scien tists as major characters. George Basalla Dr. Basalla teaches the history of science and technology at the University of Delaware. Literature and Technology. Edited by Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle. Bethlehem, Pa., and Cranbury, N.J.: Lehigh Univer sity Press and Associated University Presses, 1992. Pp. 322; notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. The editors of this collection are keen to break down the antithesis that opposes literature, conceived as imaginative and subjective, to rigorous, mechanistic technology. Postmodernist approaches to lit erature, assumed by most of the contributors, claim to be more ana lytic and objective, more “technological,” while science, so David Porush concludes in “Literature as Dissipative Structure,” could well adopt, “if it is going to succeed,” the techniques of literary ex pression. Unfortunately, these analyses often seem as hard for the uniniti TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 625 ated to understand as subatomic physics. Some pieces deal with the response to particular artifacts, mostly instruments that are them selves intellectual constructs, or aids to the intellectualization of what our senses perceive. All too often what begins as an observant comment is overworked as a key to all manner of hidden meanings. Since medieval maps of the world show the three land masses of the Old World surrounded by a circular ocean, Sylvia Tomasch refers other circles to this image, even the circular amphitheater of Chau cer’s Knight’s Tale. Indeed, Chaucer describes this structure as hav ing three gates, but in no way associates them with the three conti nents of his world. In “Gazing on Technology: Theatrum Mechanorum and the As similation ofRenaissance Machinery,” Kenneth Knoespel speculates on the machine as image, as he finds it in the picture books of me chanical invention and in the fantastic gardens of contemporary ro mantic literature, whose depictions were influenced by the real me chanical automata in the grander gardens of the day. That is a good point; but again, he pushes the theatricality of these books too far. Many of the machines therein are depicted through cutaways in brickwork. Was this really to pull back the curtain on a theatrical concealment? Or did the authors just use a relatively simple back ground against which the components of their machines stood out more clearly? Incidentally, this article is also marred by several curi ous little mistakes—starting with the title, which should be “thea trum machinanm”\ In an account of Robert Boyle’s air pump, Robert Markley points out that the more personal and...