The Angel and the Machine

By the middle of the 19th century, American writers found themselves caught between conflicting philosophies and paradigms. Just as Leo Marx's book, "The Machine in the Garden", looked at the conflict between pastoral and technological values, so "The Angel and the Machine" goes one step further and examines the conflicting paradigms at the heart of the culture's view of human nature itself. The book explicates this cultural phenomenon by examining the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It sees him as the culmination of a tradition that has its roots in both the history of science and of religion. It traces that tradition in both little- and well-known figures.