I learned from University of Alabama Press that Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America will be reviewed in the September 2021 issue of American Literature.

It is part of Carol Colatrella’s group review on 19th-century technology studies that also examines Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm by Kay Yandell (Oxford) and Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Yoshiaki Furui (also U of Alabama).

It’s at Duke’s American Literature website. Because I know many readers won’t have access to the full review (which is behind an academic subscription firewall), I’m excerpting two sentences below:

Yandell, Furui, and Williams discuss how… texts and technologies are shaped by American politics and spiritual values, revealing underpinnings of modernist and postmodern ideas of self and society.

Accessibly written and offering analyses of texts and contexts, these books should be useful for students and scholars interested in the nineteenth-century communications and transportation revolutions as an analogue to a more recent paradigm shift to digital communications shadowed by pandemic and lockdown in our own time.

It’s good to see the book is still getting reviews a few years after release, which is not uncommon in academic circles.