This thesis treats the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle, focusing on the figure of the New Woman. It aims to offer a reexamination of this figure of early feminism in relation to the technologies and techniques of the time, suggesting the simultaneously abstract and material concept of technology as a way to more fully understand the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman; her emergence as both a discursive figure in literature and as a set of social practices. Major authors include Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, and H. G. Wells, examined in the larger context of late-Victorian and fin de siècle popular and New Woman fiction. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the thesis. Locating a specific problematic in the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman, it draws upon wider discussions within gender and feminist theory to consider this central concern in New Woman criticism. Criticising gynocritical assumptions, the chapter offers a way of reading New Woman literature without relying on the gender of the author – taking Grant Allen’s (in)famous New Woman novel The Woman Who Did as a case in point. It concludes by suggesting technology as a way of examining the figure of the New Woman in its historiospecific and material context. Chapter 2 establishes the typewriter as a case in point for examining the interrelation between gender and technology at the fin de siècle. Through reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, it examines the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ to demonstrate the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman and also the mutual interaction between individual agency and technology. Chapter 3 examines the technology most associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. Through reading H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures, it considers how the social practice of bicycling comes to be associated with concepts of female freedom, problematising the notion of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the Nightingale New Style nurse. Examining the emergence of the clinical hospital, it places the New Woman nurse in a context of medical modernity. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, it explores the institutional technology of the hospital in the formation of notions of gender.

Des Astres é um conjunto de investigações artísticas ancorado nas imagens de três adventos tecnológicos: a máquina de escrever, a guilhotina e os fósforos. Os trabalhos procuram abranger, de forma rizomática, aspectos da imprecisão do processo, arruinamento e dúvidas sobre a consistência da matéria. Des Astres é organizado sob a forma de um iceberg, uma ruína flutuante onde encontram-se nostalgicamente estes antigos objetos e que organiza e desencadeia elaborações surrealistas de justaposição de realidades distantes. / Des Astres is a set of artistic investigations anchored in images of three technological advents: the typewriter, the guillotine and the safety matches. The art works seek to address, in a rhizomatic way, the aspects of the imprecision of the process, ruination and doubts about the consistency of matter. Des Astres is organized under the form of an iceberg, as a floating ruin where nostalgically these ancient objects are , and triggers elaborations of surrealist juxtaposition of distant realities.

Des Astres é um conjunto de investigações artísticas ancorado nas imagens de três adventos tecnológicos: a máquina de escrever, a guilhotina e os fósforos. Os trabalhos procuram abranger, de forma rizomática, aspectos da imprecisão do processo, arruinamento e dúvidas sobre a consistência da matéria. Des Astres é organizado sob a forma de um iceberg, uma ruína flutuante onde encontram-se nostalgicamente estes antigos objetos e que organiza e desencadeia elaborações surrealistas de justaposição de realidades distantes. / Des Astres is a set of artistic investigations anchored in images of three technological advents: the typewriter, the guillotine and the safety matches. The art works seek to address, in a rhizomatic way, the aspects of the imprecision of the process, ruination and doubts about the consistency of matter. Des Astres is organized under the form of an iceberg, as a floating ruin where nostalgically these ancient objects are , and triggers elaborations of surrealist juxtaposition of distant realities.

The problem of this study is that of comparing a concurrent approach with the traditional (delayed) approach of presenting the alphabet and number/symbol keys on the typewriter keyboard. Ten experimental classes and ten control classes, of male and female high school beginning typewriting students in Texas, participated in the study. The experimental group was introduced the alphabet and number/symbol keys concurrently with drills coordinated with Century 21 Typewriting. The control group was introduced the alphabet and number/symbol keys according to Century 21 Typewriting. Both groups used three minutes of daily practice on number drills through Lesson 60.

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