Michael Falk

This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) and Charles Harpur (1813-1867) were two of the most important Romantic poets of colonial New South Wales. In this article, I consider their engagement with Indigenous Australian languages. In ’Native Song’ (1848), Dunlop provides a transcription and translation of verse composed by her informant Wulatji (fl. 1840s), a famous Awabakal poet. In ’The Kangaroo Hunt’ (c. 1844), Harpur enriches his description of Australian landscapes with a dozen words learned from Darkinyung, Gamilaraay and Wonnarua informants. I contrast Dunlop’s universalist approach to Indigenous langauge with Harpur’s particularist approach, and contextualise their poetry in British philosophy of language. Dunlop and Harpur use Indigenous language to present Australia as a land steeped in poetry, but their recognition of Indigenous poetry undermines their own attempts to make themselves at home in the colony.

Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Though superintelligence is theoretically possible, it distracts from a more pressing problem: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the cultural roots of Frankenstein Syndrome, and provides a conceptual framework for evaluating the stupidity of artificial agents. It then identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, enslave or delude their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can augment human intelligence by serving as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways even stupid agents can thwart human aims, and demonstrate the social and scientific value of literary texts.

This year, the wikihistories team set out to understand how well Wikipedia represents Australian places and what kinds of editing practices drive those representations. Examining 35,000 articles about Australian places and interviewing volunteer editors, we found that English Wikipedia reflects an anthropocentric and neo-colonial image of Australia as a place.