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The Double-edged Sword
註釋This examination of American novels from 1900 to 1940 traces the literary treatment of the technological sublime, a simultaneous awe and fear of technology. The American technological sublime is a construct that can be useful in understanding the often conflicted and ambivalent reactions of enthusiasm and anxiety, exaltation and depression, associated with the patterns of development experienced in the US in this transitory period. The first four decades of the 20th century saw the culmination of the technological sublime in America: the loss of the innocently one-sided enthusiasm and technological republicanism of the 19th century to a fragmented, often paranoiac, and largely pessimistic vision of technology that became dominant of the literature after World War II. After an evaluation of earlier scholarship on the American technological sublime, the study examines four important decades in the development of the American technological sublime and some of the literary responses to it