John M. Picker - Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000 (review) - Victorian Studies 47:4 Victorian Studies 47.4 (2005) 597-598 Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000, by Nicholas Daly; pp. viii + 161. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, £45.00, $65.00. With Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000, Nicholas Daly completes a one-two punch he began with Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (1999). As the dates in the titles would suggest, his new book is both a sequel and a prequel to his first, moving further back into the Victorian period and forward into postmodernism, North American and British cultural studies, and film and drama as well as fiction. Analyses of Victorian and modern machine culture abound, from the classic 1960s works of Leo Marx and Herbert Sussman to more recent books like Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992). Daly provides a different, but equally compelling, kind of literary genealogy of human-machine relations that emphasizes speed and collision, moments when the body is most threatened...