Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
Many Inventions

Connects British and American literature to a changing media landscape in an era of innovation.

Richard Menke (Author)

9781108492942, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 October 2019

276 pages, 17 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.56 kg

'Menke has assembled an astonishingly rich archive of primary material, unearthing anecdotes and historical consiliences that play no small part in ramifying and finessing the transitions that link together the various sections of his study … crystal clear in its formulations … and carefully argued throughout …' Aaron Worth, Victorian Studies

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.

Introduction – inventing media and their meanings
1. A message on all channels – the unification of humanity
2. Fictions of the Victorian telephone – the medium is the media
3. New media, new journalism, New Grub Street – unsanctified typography
4. The sinking of the triple decker – format wars
5. Writers of books – the unmediated novel
6. Words fail – occulting media into information
7. A Connecticut Yankee's media wars – from orality to obliteracy
After words – the end of the book.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Popular culture [JFCA], Industrialisation & industrial history [HBTK], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]