The Melancholy Android

Explores the cultural significance of androids.

The Melancholy Android is a psychological study of the impulses behind the creation of androids. Exploring three imaginative figures—the mummy, the golem, and the automaton—and their appearances in myth, religion, literature, and film, Eric G. Wilson tracks the development of android-building and examines the lure of artificial doubles untroubled by awareness of self. Drawing from the works of philosophers Ficino, Kleist, Freud, and Jung; writers Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe; and movies such as Metropolis, The Mummy, and Blade Runner, this book not only offers a range of sites from which to analyze the relationship between mind and machine, but also considers a pressing paradoxical dilemma—loving machines we want to hate.

“…contains much fascinating material, [and] is a good resource for scholars with an interest in science-fiction cinema and its penumbra of fantasy and horror.” — Science Fiction Studies

“While executing intellectual riffs on pop-culture icons, Wilson shows how creatures of altered selfhood have maintained their hold on the human imagination across centuries … he … almost gives obsession a good name—he is a true original.” — CHOICE

“What makes Pinocchio sad? Eric Wilson’s twenty-first century anatomy of melancholy finds a rich psychological and philosophical nexus in imaginary androids, automata, golems, and mummies drawn from the annals of Western culture. In this provocative and wide-ranging meditation, the manufactured human becomes our understudy, enacting the age-old human tragicomedy of forever seeking—and failing—to connect with our mortal and immortal natures.” — Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets

“This book asks questions central for ethicists, scientists, psychologists, technologists, literary critics, and philosophers. It will force us to better define our relationship to machines and nature and to consider the scope of our human boundaries.” — Glen A. Mazis, author of Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses

Eric G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University and the author of Coleridge’s Melancholia: An Anatomy of Limbo and The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination.