Author : Richard Menke
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 34,81 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780804756914
Telegraphic Realism demonstrates the connections between British nineteenth-century fiction, media technologies, and developing ideas about information, from the postage stamp to wireless.
Author : David Hochfelder
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 47,68 MB
Release : 2013-01-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1421407973
A complete history of how the telegraph revolutionized technological practice and life in America. Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity. The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information—speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. With this book, Hochfelder supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.
Author : Sue Thomas
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 42,28 MB
Release : 2009-05-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1443810258
Organised around the themes Home and Abroad, Performative Traffic, and Image, Circulation, Mobility, Victorian Traffic: Identity, Performance, Exchange variously addresses the cultural dimensions of traffic in the long Victorian period: cross-cultural experience; colonial and racial imaginaries; everyday, literary, autobiographical and professional stagings of identity; and trade in metaphors, communications, texts, images, celebrity, character types, and quilts. The concept of traffic underpins historical interpretation and theoretical formulations, and the rhetorics of trade in Victorian usage are contextualised. Understandings of identity emphasise the performative and the negotiation of agency in relation to social and cultural scriptings of gender, class, ethnicity and community. The essays have a wide global range and reach. "This collection of essays takes as its theme an enormously important concept for the nineteenth century: traffic, a term that, in a time of unprecedented commercial and imperial expansion, technological developments, population growth and urbanization, acquired new resonance, and came to signify the intensely transactional nature of modernity. One of Ruskin’s most searing critiques of the spiritual condition of England, an invited lecture he delivered in 1864 on the topic of the Bradford Exchange, is entitled ‘Traffic’, and the word clearly signifies for him all that is wrong with post-industrial capitalism. But this stimulating volume encompasses a range of other significations that have additionally come to accrue around the term, relating for example to inter-cultural exchange, to the circulation of ideas and images, to the commodification of identity, and to literature, art and performance in the market place. The scope of the collection is, appropriately, global, including essays on England’s relations of exchange with Australia, New Zealand, North America, the Far East, and the Caribbean. What we are shown ineluctably is that the traffic between Victorian Britain and the reaches of empire, between Home and Abroad, was two-way, a vehicle for cross-cultural encounter, mediation and trade; and that cultural identity is relational, circulatory and always in motion." —Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London
Author : Richard Menke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 19,33 MB
Release : 2019-10-17
Category : Design
ISBN : 1108492940
Connects British and American literature to a changing media landscape in an era of innovation.
Author : Daniel Tyler
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 34,12 MB
Release : 2022-01-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1108583490
Suited to students and scholars alike, On Style in Victorian Fiction provides a timely and passionate argument for attending to the style of Victorian fiction as inseparable from meaning. Including a broad scope of major novelists from this period, the volume is indispensable for anyone working on Victorian literature.
Author : Juliet John
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 769 pages
File Size : 11,61 MB
Release : 2016-06-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191082090
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.
Author : Richard Jean So
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 20,51 MB
Release : 2016-05-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 023154183X
In the turbulent years after World War I, a transpacific community of American and Chinese writers and artists emerged to forge new ideas regarding aesthetics, democracy, internationalism, and the political possibilities of art. Breaking with preconceived notions of an "exotic" East, the Americans found in China and in the works of Chinese intellectuals inspiration for leftist and civil rights movements. Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to the American tradition of political democracy to inform an emerging Chinese liberalism. This interaction reflected an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures and a remarkable synthesis of shared ideals and political goals. The transpacific community that came together during this time took advantage of new advances in technology and media, such as the telegraph and radio, to accelerate the exchange of ideas. It created a fast-paced, cross-cultural dialogue that transformed the terms by which the United States and China—or, more broadly, "West" and "East"—knew each other. Transpacific Community follows the left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley's campaign to free the author Ding Ling from prison; Pearl Buck's attempt to fuse Jeffersonian democracy with late Qing visions of equality in The Good Earth; Paul Robeson's collaboration with the musician Liu Liangmo, which drew on Chinese and African American traditions; and the writer Lin Yutang's attempt to create a typewriter for Chinese characters. Together, these individuals produced political projects that synthesized American and Chinese visions of equality and democracy and imagined a new course for East-West relations.
Author : E. Thomas Finan
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 49,73 MB
Release : 2021-02-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813945615
In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of the Civil War. By focusing on three leading American authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson— Reading Reality challenges that analysis. Thomas Finan reveals how antebellum authors used words such as "real" and "reality" as key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the "real" was, in fact, central to their literary enterprise. He argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century, the "real" was often not synonymous with the physical world. It could refer to the spiritual, the sincere, or the individual’s experience. He further explains how this awareness revises our understanding of the literary and conceptual strategies of American writers. By unpacking antebellum senses of the "real," Finan casts new light on the formal traits of the period’s literature, the pressures of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, and the surprising possibilities of literary reading.
Author : Paul Gilmore
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 32,25 MB
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0804770972
Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism focuses on American romantic writers' attempts to theorize aesthetic experience through the language of electricity. In response to scientific and technological developments, most notably the telegraph, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century electrical imagery reflected the mysterious workings of the physical mind as well as the uncertain, sometimes shocking connections between individuals. Writers such as Whitman, Melville, and Douglass drew on images of electricity and telegraphy to describe literature both as the product of specific economic and social conditions and as a means of transcending the individual determined by such conditions. Aesthetic Materialism moves between historical and cultural analysis and close textual reading, challenging readers to see American literature as at once formal and historical and as a product of both aesthetic and material experience.
Author : Kurt Beals
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 48,68 MB
Release : 2019-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810141078
Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde demonstrates that the poetics of the Dada movement was profoundly influenced by the telegraph and the technological and social transformations that it brought about in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While telegraphy’s impact on Italian Futurism and German Expressionism is widely acknowledged, its formative role in Dada poetics has been largely neglected. Drawing on media history and theory, avant-garde studies, and German literary studies, Kurt Beals shows how the telegraph and the cultural discourses that surrounded it shaped the radical works of this seminal avant-garde movement. The “nonsense” strain in Dada is frequently seen as a response to the senseless violence of the First World War. Beals argues that it was not just the war that turned Dada poetry into a jumble of senseless signals—it was also the wireless.
