Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880-1900: Many Inventions

Description

From telephones and transoceanic telegraphy to typewriters and phonographs, the era of Bell and Edison brought an array of wondrous new technologies for recording and communication. At the same time, print was becoming a mass medium, as works from newspapers to novels exploited new markets and innovations in publishing to address expanded readerships. Amid the accelerated movements of inventions and language, questions about media change became a transatlantic topic, connecting writers from Whitman to Kipling, Mark Twain to Bram Stoker and Marie Corelli. Media multiplicity seemed either to unite societies or bring division and conflict, to emphasize the material nature of communication or its transcendent side, to highlight distinctions between media or to let them be ignored. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880-1900 analyzes this ferment as an urgent subject as authors sought to understand the places of printed writing in the late nineteenth century's emerging media cultures.

Richard Menke is an associate professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (2008) and a three-time recipient of essay prizes from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

'Menke's book has much to offer readers interested in periodical studies, especially the connections between new mediums such as the telegraph and the developing mass media.' Troy J. Bassett, Victorian Periodicals Review 'The book leaves you with a sense of a complex interlaced media system, and it is an exceptionally well written cross-disciplinary book. It is also to be considered a great strength of the book that it deals with a period of only 20 years, allowing the reader to get a sense of how deeply technological developments pushed changes in media and of how writing was viewed during this focused period of time.' Laura Sovso Thomasen, Metascience