Copyrighted Material

Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Chapter 1
Introduction:
The Nineteenth-Century
Invention of Media
Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley
Media, Technology, Literature
Media, as we understand the word today, is a nineteenth-century invention. Yet
what the term media obscures is media history, not only the exponential explosion
of print in the nineteenth century but also the massive proliferation of a wide
variety of popular mechanical devices, from the kaleidoscope, thaumatrope,
phenakistoscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, and kinetoscope to the stereograph,
photograph, telegraph, typewriter, player piano, telephone, phonograph, and
early flm. This is not to deny the centuries-long history of media machines, but
in tandem with unprecedented increases in literacy rates, enlargement of urban
spaces and imperial networks, and expansion of industrialization and commodity
exchange, the nineteenth century experienced the emergence of media ubiquity.
Together with the destabilization of traditional media hierarchies, whereby the
status of the image was increasingly challenged by acoustic and tactile means,
new and residual, multi and mixed media exemplifed processes of remediation in
relations of adaptation, mutation, incorporation, and disruption. The sheer increase
in volume and diversity of media was accompanied by an expansion of the scale of
information and communications distribution. Throughout this period media and
medium could be used interchangeably. However, media would increasingly refer
also to specifc channels of mass communication, such as advertising, periodicals,
newspapers, and educational print. This rapidly transforming environment of
media discourse and media machines plugged into media networks contributed
signifcantly to ways of knowing and experiencing the world, simultaneously
refecting, producing and recording alterations of consciousness and extensions of
the human sensorium.
After a century of innovative encounters between industrial technology and
the communicative imperative, media emerged in the early twentieth century as a
modern myth. By the 1920s media had coalesced into an all-encompassing term for
the collective means of mass communication, including newspapers, magazines,
radio, television, and flm, as well as the institutions that own or organize their
production, circulation, dissemination and consumption, and the individuals who
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 2
work for such organizations (OED). More than an umbrella under which to huddle
the aggregate means of mass communication, media has come to describe an
industry and an ideology.
The moment of consolidation of the nineteenth-century multiplicity of media
into a totality of unique singularity in the early twentieth century thus marks
the simultaneous appropriation and disavowal of media history, the spatial
incorporation of the historical many into the one true media now understood as
the frst sign of a media matrix. The signifcance of this double move of spatial
appropriation and temporal erasure cannot be understated. When the word that
had been used in the particular to refer to specifc means of mass communication
evolved into the singular term for the heterogeneous plurality of media, history
would seem to begin out of nowhere anew. With this apparently immaculate birth,
radically cut off from a previous context of use and lexicon of meaning, comes
the lament for an absolute irrecoverable past and the opposition to a seemingly
monstrously media-saturated present, captured variously in such monumental
twentieth-century analytical touchstones as Martin Heiddeggers enframing,
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimers culture industry, Guy Debords society of
the spectacle, Harold Inniss present-mindedness, Jean Baudrillards simulation,
and Paul Virilios information bomb.
If media as a term thus regulates the temporal borders of media studies,
historians of particular communications media decry their disciplines historical
amnesia (Brake, Print in Transition xiv; King and Plunkett 12) and grand
narratives of media progression and supercession (Acland xix). Yet this forgetting
is in some sense systemic, for the content of one medium is always another
(McLuhan, Understanding Media 8), no medium is ever completely replaced by
another (Stafford 1), the representation of one medium is another remediation
(Bolter and Grusin 45), and new media is as old as the hills (Mitchell, What do
Pictures Want? 211).
Any recovery of the history of media must therefore also historicize media
logic: temporal rupture signifes the renunciation that is a precondition for copying
on a different register. This is to say that the history of media only confrms the
Derridean precept that writing and by extension technics more generally underpin
the transcendental logic of Western metaphysics, which is predicated on a
disavowal of inscription as the condition of transcendence. The erasure of the
complex and multiple media histories from the concept of media is inherent to
media logic, indeed is in some senses its culmination, anticipated early in the
nineteenth century, as the chapters in this book show, by Mary Shelleys endlessly
replicating media monster Frankenstein, William Wordsworths media memory
copied from the writing it denies, and Samuel Taylor Coleridges secondary
imagination understood as the ultimate virtual reality system.
A different logical structure emerges in the context of Heideggers critique of
technology as a means-ends instrumentality or tool, where media can function as a
rejoinder to his reminder of the traditional relationship in Greek thought between
techne and poiesis. The association between the technology of the printed book
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 3
specifcally and knowledge was the complex and uneven work of what Roger
Chartier calls the second revolution of the book, the age of Gutenberg to the
nineteenth century.
1
By the nineteenth century, the episteme of technology evinced
an ineluctable tension, with machine technology associated with the material tools
of emergent industrial forms of production and techne linked not only to the art or
print medium, but increasingly to what would become the domain of media, the
means of imaginative creation and communications.
As media devices multiplied in the nineteenth century so too did media and art
theory on topics ranging from memory and photography to narrative and aesthetics.
Never far from the center of nineteenth-century cultural debates, media, now a
key term anchoring ways of knowing in a century of wild transformation, was
often considered in relation to hierarchies and privilege determined by oppositions
between tradition and innovation, fancy and imagination, authentic and machine
art, popular and high culture. However, the mutually defning relationship between
techne and poiesis in the age of mechanical reproduction ensured a special affnity
between literature and media that opened up new possibilities of structures of
representation and new genres, confrming Linda Hughess apt pronouncement
that the study of literary history is the study of media history,
2
an understanding
central to this collections interest in the place of literature in the nineteenth-
century invention of media.
Media and the Sensorium
What did it mean to see, hear, and touch in this age of media explosions and
manifestos? New and complex relationships to the human sensorium developed
alongside medias coming of age, calling for a reconceptualization of the sensing
body. Marshall McLuhans notion that all media are extensions of some human
facultypsychic or physical (Medium 26)has its foundation in this historical
moment when McLuhans fgure of media as an extension of the body was
imagined with surprising variety. Books for the blind became prosthetics for the
eye, the pianists hands behaved spellingly, and the ear heard more than ever before
with the musical/mechanical impressions of the typewriter and the sounding out of
the multi-media pages of the Victorian gift book. Decadent writing imagined the
social and physiological possibilities of expanded sensory states through concepts
of synesthesia and neuresthesia, while recurring tropes of loss and amputation as
well as hauntings (Nead, Haunted 34) and communications vampires (Kittler,
Gramophone 225) suggested the concomitant fears about the volatility and
integrity of this sensory scaffolding.
1
See Adrian Johnss discussion of the relationship between print media and the
production of knowledge.
2
Linda Hughes, SIDEWAYS!Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture,
Plenary Lecture, NAVSA Conference, University of Victoria, Canada, October 11, 2007.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 4
The eye, ear, and skin were not just imagined as extended by media devices but
were also understood to be incorporated within them. The introduction of the electric
telegraph in the middle of the century not only revolutionized communications, it
also retuned the ear and retooled the sense of touch. Similarly the introduction of
the solo piano recital trained audiences to listen for the sound of the musicians
touch. The nineteenth-century appreciation for the sometimes intimate encounters
between body and media, the ways in which the body massaged the medium
and the medium massaged the body, anticipated Roland Barthess later critical
appreciation for the grain of the voicethe body in the voice as it sings, the
hand as it writes, the limb as it performs (188). This incorporation of the body
into the periods mediating structures reveals not only the expansion of the human
sensorium, but also shows how the two were enmeshed, creating the possibility for
understanding the seeing, hearing, and touching body as a multi-media machine.
The science of perception and the study of physiology grew alongside the
marvelously unstable triumvirate of object, organ, and medium. The mechanics
of sight, such as the retinal afterimage, were studied by a variety of European
scholars in relation to what Jonathan Crary argues in Techniques of the Observer
was an increasingly abstract and subjective model of vision based on biological
difference. The German scientist, Ernst Heinrich Weber, studied the physiology
of touch, mapping the human bodys skin receptors and discovering an atlas of
tactile acuity. These studies were part of a larger cultural drive to observe the
exciting and unpredictable sensing body as it became a nineteenth-century media
phenomenon. Seeing, hearing, and touching were mediated through the instruments
of science, measured and objectifed for the larger purpose of knowing, educating,
and modernizing the senses. This mapping of the senses was also arguably the
exercise of sensorship, as demonstrated in Webers separation of pain from the
tactile system.
Despite this impulse to map and rationalize the senses, to separate them from the
screams of the body, they were also understood as irrational and uncharted. They
were regularly fgured as a haven from technological and metropolitan modernity.
Touch, regarded as the least regulated of senses, was frequently appropriated for
the purpose of exploring presumably authentic and unmediated human experience.
The haptic dimension of the human sensorium allowed for a suspension of
perception, a releasing and blending of the senses rather than a concerted modern
drive to focus them.
3
This romance of touch mounted an important critique of
vision and its cultural authority, notably becoming the sensory nook most often
associated with femininity and queerness.
With the collapse of the Cartesian separation of physiology from psychology
and cognition, the mind as thinking substance could no longer be thought apart from
physical location. The new biological sciences redefned thought as the product of
3
See Jonathan Crarys Suspensions of Perception for his discussion of the regulation
of perception and the heightened premium on focusing ones attention in the latter half of
the nineteenth century.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 5
an embodied brain, itself an assemblage of parts attached to a nervous system
understood as a mediating apparatus integral to a knowledge of the world. Long
before the railway annihilated space by time, a phrase conventionally attributed
to Marx,
4
the neurological legacy of Romanticism had radically connected time
and space to the deep interiors of the mind. Whether it be Luigi Galvanis theory
of electrical nerve transmission, David Hartleys associationism and attendant
vibration theory, or Erasmus Darwins animating principle of matter, thought was
measured through the sensory mediations of motion through space, contributing
to the development of a new spatial imagination intimately tied to technologies of
travel and expressed in such tropes as the march of intellect.
5
The new biologism notwithstanding, the mind retained its rational capacity to
serve as archive and storage bank, but rather than a Cartesian ocular mechanism
or a Lockean blank slate for data inscription, the brain envisioned by nineteenth-
century physiologists was an active data processor capable of computing time
and vitality itself minutely in the mortal motions of the nerves. Spatial charting of
physiological networking affected the entire range of cognition, sense perception
and memory, revealing complex divisions among conscious, unconscious and
automatic processes of thought, heightened consciousness, circumventions
of willful control, and unintentional actions.
6
The novel sciences of animal
magnetism, telepathy, and mesmerism posited the carnally mediated mind as a data
bank, housing information in excess of consciousness yet potentially accessible to
others capable of virtual or paranormal communications, while medical science
pathologized the inconstancies and unpredictability of the bodys medial work.
7

Throughout the nineteenth century, the scientifc recognition and codifcation
of rapid pulses of neural transmission as data ensured the psyche more than an
optical relation to bombardments by new developments in changing technology,
communication, and transportation.
Scientifc reorganization of mind-body relations together with the novel
experiences and new forms of consciousness accompanying technological
modernitys transformations of space and time resulted in changes in forms of
representation and mediation, beginning with the structure of the image itself.
Word and image contested and vied for supremacy in the mechanically reproduced
illustrated book; text inscribed voice to challenge the graphical nature not only
of writing, as Friedrich Kittler suggests, but the printed image as well; memory
mediated poetrys virtual immersion in imaginary things; and the hand, as
4
For two classic studies, see Michael Freemans Railways and the Victorian
Imagination and Wolfgang Schivelbuschs The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of
Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century.
5
See Alice Jenkinss Space and the March of Mind and Alan Richardsons British
Romanticism and the Science of the Mind.
6
See Nicholas Damess The Physiology of the Novel and Jane Woods Passion and
Pathology in Victorian Fiction.
7
See Laura Otiss Networking.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 6
metonym for the creative laborer, became especially fraught in its relationship to
moveable type, an ambiguous sign oscillating between alienation and authenticity,
disconnection and circumvention. If the book had ordered cognition literally since
the Renaissance through a spectrum of bibliographical practices from title pages
and chapter divisions right down to the spacing of paragraphs and typesetting,
the mass produced multi-media art book of the mid-Victorian parlor permeated
domestic space with the touch and smell of the physical artifact, the music of the
words on the page, and the dual perspective of reading and gazing at images.
The bifurcated vision and sensory fullness exemplifed by the mid-Victorian
fne art book form on the one hand, and the virtual reality system sponsored by
the mediating function of memory in Romantic poetry on the other, expanded
with new visual devices and facilitated the development of the spatial imagination.
Industrialized techniques of image-making enabled a new mobility of vision that
may have uprooted the eye from traditional networks of referentiality, but it also
rerouted the image into recombinations of time, space, memory, and meaning.
Like vision, the image was a temporal, as well as a spatial, composite. With
both cognitive and corporal circuitry incorporated into the networks of modern
technology, the conditions emerged for reconfgurations of visual space and time
by radical imminence and close proximities as well as by investments in mixed
forms of feeling vision and tactile looking.
8
Stereoscopic realism incorporated
depth perception and haptic orientations; photographic narrative emerged out of
the photographs perceived fragmentation; and kaleidoscopic three-dimensional
manipulations of perspective in the play of immersion and transcendence signaled
new modes of consciousness in advance of early flm. Throughout the nineteenth
century, burgeoning techniques of mediation and media technologies challenged
mimetic forms with varieties of representation amenable to the three dimensions of
space as well as the fourth dimension of time (Virilio 10), the richness of sensuality,
the kinetic pace or elusive punctum of modern experience (Nead, Haunted Gallery
110), and the possibility of virtual life.
Mediation understood as embodied, enmeshed, and immediate, but also
as abstract, distant, and incorporeal troubles any neat history of mediation as
progressing from objective and separate to immediate or immersive as postulated
by Crary, Baudrillard, and Virilio among others. The sense of space as drastically
contracted or enlarged made possible intensifed conditions of hypermediation and
information overload, sensory confusion, forgetting, and states of distraction in
an era of too much print, too many copies, series, and adaptations. Rhythms of
speech, fows and surges of inspiration, and shocks of body pulsations became
timed to the changing sense of time and space that accompanies rapid technological
change. Developments in tele-communications brought distant people into virtual
contact through instant messaging and forms of long distance intimacy, all of
which potentially confused and confated experiences of time and space while
also producing new imaginative spaces.
8
For discussions of tactile looking in the nineteenth century, see Martin Jay, David
Trotter, Ron Broglio, Linda Williams, and Lynda Neads Haunted Gallery.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 7
Media and the Social
A developing concept of media in the nineteenth century recalibrated the mind and
body, reshaped encounters with space and time, and reasserted the social function
of art and literature. Media, already understood as a channel of communication,
a material for art and literature, and a process of mediation, also became a social
practice. Raymond Williams describes how the making of media into social practice
in the nineteenth century stemmed from the crucial role it played in negotiating the
relationship between art and its material production. An understanding of media
as social practice allowed for the recognition of the skilled labor of art while
preserving it from its conditions of production. Media was thus conceived as an
intermediary social process between material means and artistic product necessary
in an age where the value of both was threatened by mechanical reproduction and
heightened capitalist production. W.J.T. Mitchell has recently criticized Williams
for jettison[ing] the whole idea of the medium as an unnecessary reifcation
(What do Pictures Want? 204). In attempting to formulate a theory of media,
particularly one that addresses the totality of media, Mitchell delimits the role
media played in the organization of art and public life in the nineteenth century,
or possibly succumbs to medias logic of historical erasure. Williams theory of
media as social practice, like Walter Benjamins assertion that the erosion of the
aura of the artwork from its unique existence in space and time revolutionized the
social function of art, importantly links time, space, art, and the social while tracing
medias frequent identifcation with activity and movement and process (King
and Plunkett 6) back to the nineteenth-century invention of media.
The Victorian family photo album was just one of many novel forms of mixed
media in the period that allowed for refection on the meaning and formation of
the social. These photo albums were pictorial narratives of family relationships
that relied on photographys unique indexical qualities to imagine and lay out
new dynastic histories and futures. The intersection of photography and narrative
in these albums suggested the various multi-media trajectories of the family and
possibilities for its redesign. The family photo album was a Victorian media event
where the family contract could thus be repeatedly renegotiated. In the same
period, urban spectatorship turned the multi-media city into social practice with
the emergence of social investigation, reform work, and slumming. It exploited
the technologies of navigation and perception to help the nations poor while
transcoding the bourgeois social body onto a topography of desire and disgust.
9

Attending a piano recital, playing a player piano, operating telegraph networks,
even reading Braillethese too were unique media events of the nineteenth
century that generated new tactile-acoustic models of social experience. While
suggesting musics renewed centrality to art and society, they also participated in a
9
See Peter Stallybrass and Allon Whites classic account of the transcoding of
the nineteenth-century psyche, body, and city in The Contaminating Touch. On urban
spectatorship and investigation in the period, see Seth Kovens Slumming.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 8
developing early digital revolution that converted data into discrete units for storage,
transmission, and expression and altered psychic and social consciousness.
A growing awareness of medias social function also made it an important
instrument for social progress and control. Sighted educators and printers for the
blind in nineteenth-century Britain drew on a visually-oriented print culture to
educate blind readers. Driven by the desire for touch to imitate sight, they wanted
books of the blind to conform to those of the sighted, and for blind readers to
emulate sighted readers. Visual culture was used to shape and control the literacy
of the visually disabled, possibly to stave off a potential crisis in the hegemony of
a visually-oriented print culture. For the late nineteenth-century social investigator
George Sims, however, certain models of visuality enabled social empathy and
reform. In attempting to release the capacities of the image, he developed the
metaphor of the social kaleidoscope which explored a shared perceptual process
that accounted for the fux of modern London life.
Other groups mobilized powerful critiques of vision and visual culture in order
to seek social enfranchisement and diversify cultural and political life. The group
of men reputedly behind the composition of the late nineteenth-century clandestine
novel Teleny mounted such a challenge in contesting the association between
visual pleasure and desire. The novel constructs desire between men through
visual synesthesia and tactile exchange, while denigrating the hard-lit visual
pleasure depicted in heterosexually-oriented obscene novels, photographs, and
postcards. The novel advances a social politics by queering vision and activating
touch. Acoustic and tactile cultural systems were also repeatedly explored as
social alternatives to visual culture. The sonic vibrations of the electric telegraph
became associated with new social types like telegraph girls (working women)
and telegraph boys (male prostitutes). The social experience of gender and
sexuality was importantly reconfgured, while anxieties about the vulnerability of
the periods communication and information networks were amplifed.
Media became a practice in the nineteenth century, a device, process, and
artform that could be practiced as one might practice piano, writing, or politics.
The nineteenth-century conception of media as a social practice anticipated the
many compound forms of the word in the twentieth century, such as media event,
media circus, media market, media education, media elite, and media practice,
all the while feverishly reinventing the physiological, spatial-temporal, and social
function of visual, acoustic, and haptic experience in the nineteenth century.
Image, Sound, Touch
Our collection follows the invention of media in the nineteenth century through
the intervallic histories of image, sound, and touch. This constellation of image,
sound, and touch is a unique approach to what Beatrice Farwell has referred to as
the nineteenth-century media explosion, in that it contests the primacy of the
image alone as the primary means of studying and theorizing nineteenth-century
media. While visuality was central in a period distinctive for its salvo of new
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 9
encounters with images, the critical focus on the visual has become entrenched in
nineteenth-century studies, isolating the image and obscuring historical research on
other forms of media and mediation.
10
There are at least two explanations for this
ocular-centric bias. The dominance of visual culture in Cultural Studies generally
has had a profound impact on how nineteenth-century history and literature have
been studied in recent years. Stuart Halls call for Cultural Studies to move beyond
literature (the purview of Raymond Williams) marked a turn to a methodology that
interpreted culture visually.
11
Media theorists have also privileged the image, most
recently Mitchell who lists the assertion that the image is the primary currency
of media among his ten theses on media (What Do Pictures Want? 211). Such
theories habitually overlook the logic of media, which is to erase its historical
origins and ignore the complex multi-media facets of its history. One of our
primary goals is to dislodge the privileged position the image enjoys, breathing
new life into it by putting it in conversation with sound and touch.
The recent turn to sound in the nineteenth century has helped open up such
dialogue. Scholars have drawn attention to new forms of recorded voice, print
culture and sound technology, prosody, and musical culture. In adding to earlier,
albeit overshadowed, research on literacy and orality, as well as the printed voice,
we amplify the sounds of the nineteenth century, which were neglected by the
New Critics when Victorian literature was deemed unworthy of close listening
and bypassed by media scholars like Marshall McLuhan who fast-forwarded to the
twentieth century to fnd the acoustic age.
12
Our collection also addresses the importance of touch in the nineteenth
century. While the nineteenth-century body has remained in our critical feld of
10
Over the last few decades, there have been signifcant studies of nineteenth-century
visuality and visual culture: these include studies on the material book (David Finkelstein,
Laurel Brake, Leah Price), image-text relations (W.J.T Mitchell, Lorraine-Janzen Kooistra,
Jerome McGann, Nancy Armstrong), commodity culture (Erika Rappaport, Regina Gagnier),
visual culture (Kate Flint, Lynda Nead, Dennis Denisoff, Isobel Armstrong), spectacles
and the carnivalesque (Richard Altick, Peter Stallybrass & Allon White), museums and
collections (Susan Crane, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill), visual technologies (Helen Groth,
Tom Gunning, Pamela Thurschwell, Nicholas Daly, Daniel Novak), and the science and
philosophy of vision and observation (Jonathan Crary, Chris Otter, Martin Jay). A number
of edited collections have also specifcally dealt with visuality in the nineteenth century
(John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patton, Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan).
11
See David Morleys Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies and
Margaret Dikovitskayas Visual Culture: the Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn
for discussions on the relationship between visual culture and Cultural Studies. It must
be acknowledged, however, that such Cultural Studies pioneers as Hall and Dick Habdige
also occasionally addressed sound in their explorations of popular music in contemporary
culture; see, for example, Hall and Whannel, The Popular Arts and Hebdige, Subculture.
12
For relevant studies on nineteenth-century sound technology and acoustic culture,
see Ivan Kreilkamp, Lisa Gitelman, John Picker, Jonathan Sterne, Yopie Prins, Patrick
Brantlinger, Timothy Day, John Hughes, and Eric Griffths. Richard Cavells McLuhan in
Space is a useful guide to Marshall McLuhans notion of acoustic space.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 10
vision, repeatedly fgured in studies of gender and sexuality, the critical heritage of
the Freudian repressive hypothesis and Foucauldian discourse analysis has either
suppressed or abstracted this body and its new encounters with touch and digitality.
More recent studies by Linda Williams and David Trotter on the nineteenth-
century phenomena of the corporealized observer and haptic seeing have begun
to engage with touch, but are still organized around visual experience.
13
We are
interested in the meanings of touch that developed alongside digital technologies
and experiments with electricity,
14
especially its repeated fguration as an escape
from visual hegemony and alternative forms of media.
Our bringing together of image, sound, and touch comes on the heels of a
recent surge of cross-cultural, interdisciplinary collections that approach media
history through concepts of media change, multi-media, old and new media,
media convergence, residual media, and remediation. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey
B. Pingrees New Media, 17401915 is a pioneering study of historical media
technologies that contests both succession and progression models of media change
by uncovering the history of old new media. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburns
Rethinking Media Change does similar historical mapping while James Lyons
and John Plunketts Multimedia Histories from the Magic Lantern to the Internet
applies a dialectical approach to the study of past and present visual media.
15
What
distinguishes our collection from these is not only our focus on the nineteenth
century, but more importantly our fundamental premise that many of the current
models of media and mediation today originated in the nineteenth century and
were explored through the varied encounters of image, sound, and touch.
The chapters that follow span the length of the nineteenth century and consider
a variety of texts that foreground the British experience while recognizing and
engaging with the centurys continental, transatlantic, colonial, and international
networks. Famous works of nineteenth-century literature, such as Wordsworths I
wandered lonely as a cloud and Shelleys Frankenstein, are discussed alongside a
range of lesser-known literary, scientifc, and pornographic works. Together these
chapters speak to the special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring
the important interconnections of science, technology, and art in nineteenth-
century understandings of media. We have elected not to organize these chapters
in a rigidly chronological or teleological fashion because we engage with history
13
Laura Marks gives a useful overview of haptic studies in Touch: Sensuous Theory
and Multisensory Media.
14
Recent studies on nineteenth-century technologies of communication and
transportation lay important groundwork for thinking further about new haptic and kinetic
encounters with time and space: See Jay Clayton, Richard Menke, Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
and Michael Freeman.
15
Other recent edited collections on media history and theory include Charles
Aclands Residual Media, Robert Hassan and Julian Thomass New Media Theory Reader,
and Thomas Keenan and Wendy Hui Kyong Chuns New Media, Old Media. Recent
single-authored studies include Lisa Gitelmans Always Already New, Henry Jenkinss
Convergence Culture, and Oliver Graus MediaArtHistories.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 11
through the historiographic tropes of Michel Foucaults archaeology, Karl Marxs
dialectic, Henri Bergsons simultaneity, and Hayden Whites metahistory. We
have accordingly organized the chapters into three sections on Image, Sound, and
Touch. Each of the 11 chapters concentrates on the specifc visual, acoustic, or
haptic dimensions of media in the nineteenth century while also addressing their
multiple and varied interactions.
Our Image section comprises four chapters that cohere around exemplary
moments of the image in different nineteenth-century literary contexts. These
chapters explore the mediating role of the image in relationship to writing and
print culture: on the one hand, its erasure and denigration of other media forms,
and on the other hand, its collusion with them as a means to explore the limits of
representation and the corporeal boundaries of perception. The centrality of the
image in the nineteenth century was a product of its own mediating function, these
chapters show, but its centrality was by no means consolidated.
Richard Menke examines the role of the image in the mediating relationship
between Romantic writing and memory as one that ultimately effaces the work of
writing in the manufacturing of memory. Menke examines Dorothy Wordsworths
Grasmere Journal in relation to William Wordsworths famous poem I wandered
lonely as a Cloud (1807), revisiting one of the most familiar texts of British
Romanticism in light of the history of media and the place of writing within the
Romantic-era media ecology. Menke argues that the poems appropriation and
reshaping of the journals recollections treats memory as a medium for virtual
perception and for experience liberated from the constraints of time and place.
He thus demonstrates that the actual activity of writing does not fgure in
Wordsworths presentation of Romantic memory as medium. While the properties
of Wordsworthian memory closely match those of memorized writing and print
in a society saturated with writing, the poem turns to the retinal afterimage as an
organic paradigm for the replication of visual experience.
While Menke discovers the privileging of the image over Romantic writing
in the work of memory, Vanessa Warne similarly discovers the privileging
of visuality in later cultural debates surrounding blind reading and embossed
printing in nineteenth-century Britain. Warne argues that the sighted communitys
notions about the relationship between touch and sight informed and impeded
the development of a print culture for blind people. While tracing how the
sighted community favored sight over touch in blind print culture, amidst new
conversations about touch in Britain stemming from the scientifc experiments of
Ernst Heinrich Weber, Warne ultimately reveals how visual disability challenged
what it meant to read and thus pointed to a possible crisis in the hegemony of an
image-oriented print culture.
Daniel Novak shifts the focus to alternative nineteenth-century treatments of
the image, especially those instrumental in releasing its powers to mediate time and
space by entertaining its relationship to writing and narrative. Through readings of
nineteenth-century British writing about photography, Novak discovers a uniquely
Victorian theory of photography that contests critical accounts of the photographs
static quality. Not only did nineteenth-century photographers, writers, and
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 12
consumers understand photography as a form of narrative that could fragment and
recombine much like a story, they also understood them as fctions of pictorial
truth. Novak discovers the way in which the apparent indexical quality of the
photographic image was manipulated to release the image from the limits of time
and space, creating the possibility of a more literary form of photography and
a new future for photographic history. His chapter importantly calls attention to
the special relationship between image and narrative that was foundational to the
concept of media and mediation in the nineteenth century.
Helen Groth closes the Image section by shifting from photography to an
earlier visual technology, the kaleidoscope. She examines the two-volume series
of vignettes that comprises George Simss The Social Kaleidoscope in relation
to a broader cultural analysis of the pervasive use of kaleidoscopic metaphors
in nineteenth and early twentieth-century accounts of London life, from Charles
Dickens to Arthur Symons, which shared Simss fascination with the idea of a
perceptual process that transcended the circumscription of a single body and
mind and encompassed the diversity of a shared modern urban experience that
only transiently cohered. Groth outlines how the multiple perspectives of the
kaleidoscope suggested a pre-cinematic desire to foreground movement and a
fuid interplay between imagination and perception as the experience of the other
deepened into a three-dimensional encounter. The fne recalibrations of perception
by these nineteenth-century writers signaled a modern drive to move beyond
the Marxist distrust of the visual, to unsettle static models of vision through a
new interplay of eye, feeling, and imagination, and to embrace the descriptive
possibilities of kaleidoscopic vision for social reform.
The second section, on Sound, shifts to emphasize the complexity and nuances
of sound and its importance to the mixed-media nature of nineteenth-century
writing and literature. These chapters amplify sound in print and newly listen to
the sound of touch, allowing for a re-examination of the media volatility of print,
the continually fuctuating hierarchies of image, sound, and touch, and the shared
tactile and acoustic history of nineteenth-century language machines. In these
chapters sound is neither metaphor nor myth. Rather, the chapters mount a challenge
to the hegemony of the image in poetic theory, print media, and nineteenth-century
culture more generally by calling attention to the literal materializations of voice,
speech, and musical notation and their effects on readers, writers, and musicians.
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra focuses on three Christmas gift books found on
the drawing-room tables of 1870 to 1872 to argue that the Victorian illustrated
gift books controversial appeal was a function of its ability to disseminate the
fne arts of poetry, painting, and music into everyday life in a multi-media form
that focused on the performative and experiential pleasures of bodies interacting
in social space. Kooistras analysis shows how the collaborative art form that
developed in mid-century gift books may be seen as a popular realization of the
poetics of sensation theorized by Arthur Hallam in 1831. Such a poetic theory
emphasized the capacity of poetic language to act like music in conveying mood
and like painting in conveying images suffused with emotion. As such, Christmas
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 13
gift books made the poetics of sensation material rather than metaphoric as well as
modern in mass appeal, thereby claiming an important place in everyday life.
Linda Hughes continues the examination of the complexities of acoustic culture
by focusing on conjoined poems and visual art works that self-consciously explore
arts status through an understanding of music as a print medium in relation to
other art media. Through close and careful analysis of Tennysons The Palace of
Art (1832, revised 1842), Dante Gabriel Rossettis St Cecilia (1857) as well as
his watercolor The Blue Closet (18561857), and William Morriss poem of the
same title (1858), Hughes addresses instances in which awareness of remediation
is heightened in order to demonstrate how Victorian poetry, painting, and music
were all remediated forms that glanced toward or incorporated each other in their
representational practices and in their attempts to establish distinctiveness or pre-
eminence. Hughes argues that music acquired a special status as supplement to
vision more sensual than other arts and elevated by a freedom from words, thereby
offering a new aesthetic paradigm for understanding the relationship between arts.
The chapter thus clarifes the challenge mounted by music to the supremacy of
visual culture, the intricate, often contradictory responses music inspired, and the
inseparability of multiple aesthetic media in nineteenth-century art and literature.
Ivan Raykoffs closing chapter for the Sound section investigates how
throughout much of the nineteenth century the piano keyboard provided a
conceptual and practical model for new media technologies such as the typewriter
and the telegraph. The musical/mechanical interface that the piano, typewriter,
and telegraph briefy shared suggests a fundamental connection between the act of
tactile impression and the Romantic ideal of individual expression. This musical
technology of expressive touch, already well-established by the early nineteenth
century, inspired later efforts to convey verbal messages through a similar
mechanism. As a device for the mediation of both musical gesture and meaningful
language, the piano keyboard had a signifcant infuence on new practices of
representation and reproduction that frst emerged during the nineteenth century
and that continue to shape our contemporary experience of music, language, touch,
and feeling.
Our fnal section, on Touch, moves from Raykoffs chapter on tactile models of
writing and music in the nineteenth century to highlight the increasing importance
of touch in the periodparticularly in impressing relationships between media and
the sensing body. Ranging from a historical analysis of an important nineteenth-
century study of the science of touch to literary explorations of touch as a retreat
from visual hegemony, this section concludes with a refection on the collection as
a whole by looking at Frankenstein as a fgure for media and media history.
David Parisis chapter opens the fnal section with a study of German
physiologist and psychologist Ernst Heinrich Webers (17951878) research on
touch, which began around 1825 and signaled a shift in thinking about touch
from a pre-modern to a modern model. Parisi argues that Webers experiments
represent the germinal moment in the modern history of touch, where the aims of
the project of modernity are articulated in a new model of rationalized tactility.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 14
The modernization of touch involved casting the gaze of science upon it, in the
process producing a body of knowledge about touch, the authority of which was
rooted in the whole web of faith in experimentation and scientifc tools to yield
fundamental truths about human perceptual processes.
Just as Parisi shows how touch was being rationalized in nineteenth-century
empirical study, Colette Colligan demonstrates how it was also being imagined
as irrational, beyond the purview of science and technology. This chapter focuses
on the late nineteenth-century novel Teleny (1890, 1893) in relation to the decline
of Europes clandestine book trade and obscenitys turn to visual media. While
reading the novels eroticism as profoundly shaped by the changing media
geography of the highly specialized book trade which produced, circulated,
published, and translated it in modern London and later Paris, Colligan suggests
that Teleny responds to this representational crisis and resists the modernization
of obscenity by developing a profoundly anti-technological, queer sensuality that
locates desire in tactile exchange rather than stock visual pleasures. The novels
retreat to the secret touch is one of the many ways in which touch was understood
as a sensory withdrawal beyond the gaze and tools of science and modernity.
Christopher Keep follows with an examination of a signifcant moment in
the development of electrical communications: the shift from optical to auditory
telegraphic instruments. The chapter concludes by way of a reading of Henry
James novella In the Cage (1898), in which a young postal employee succumbs
to the sympathetic vibrations she detects in the correspondence between two
members of the gentry class, suggesting the threat which female telegraph
operators posed not only to traditional notions of femininity but to the security of
information networks of the nineteenth century. A shift from eye to ear facilitated
by the universal tuning fork of the electric telegraph, Keep argues, resulted in a
reorganization of the senses that challenged enlightenment ideals of distance and
objectivity by turning to touch and embodied being and knowledge. Keep uncovers
signal instances of nineteenth-century notions of touch (as feminine, embodied,
and potentially unstable) and also highlights nineteenth-century thinking about
media in relation to distance or proximity.
The collection closes with a return to Frankenstein to explore how the novel,
as a narrative about the mechanical reproduction of life and the mass circulation of
representation, puts the question of media into monstrous crisis, while the ensuing
multi-media myth often expresses a deep uneasiness about the science of life and the
various forms of power over life attendant upon modernity. Focusing on the 1831
edition of Frankenstein, Margaret Linley traces the relation between mediation and
what counts as life to examine the novels legacy in social and political contexts, from
the world of horse racing to agitation for political reform. Throughout, she argues
that Frankenstein can be held up as the very model of an emergent understanding
of media in the early nineteenth century as a somatic technology that touches and
activates the bodily senses and feelings, and thereby moves or mobilizes audiences,
transporting them to other places or even other worlds, a transformative model
which continues to dominate our understanding of the relation between our means
of communicating and the value we place on life itself.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 15
Collectively these chapters refect on medias coming of age when many of its
properties were explored and ascribed. Debates about the currency of the image,
models of remediation, and different capacities of referential and non-referential
expression multiply at the moment when media is an object of contemplation. And
in the literature of the period especially we fnd this forgotten nineteenth-century
theory of media.
Works Cited
Acland, Charles R. ed. Residual Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.
Adorno Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans.
John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1994.
Altick, Richard. English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading
Public, 18001900. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.
. The Shows of London. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978.
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworks: Glass Culture and the Imagination
18301880. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British
Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen
Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Ed. Sylvre Lotringer. Trans.
Bernard and Caroline Schutze. Paris: Editions Galile, 1988.
. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1994.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings.
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996.
Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einsteins Theory.
Trans. Leon Jacobson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1999.
Brake, Laurel, Bill Brown and David Finkelstein, eds. Nineteenth-Century Media
and the Construction of Identities. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Brake, Laurel and Julie F. Codell, eds. Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors,
Authors, Readers. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition, 18501910: Studies in Media and Book History.
New York: St Martins, 2001.
. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the
Nineteenth Century. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994.
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in
Nineteenth Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.
Broglio, Ron. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments,
17501830. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008.
Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: U of Toronto
P, 2002.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 16
Chartier, Roger ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early
Modern Europe. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.
Christ, Carol T. and John O. Jordan, eds. Victorian Literature and the Victorian
Visual Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth
Century in Postmodern Culture. New York : Oxford UP, 2003.
Crane, Susan A. ed. Museums and Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1999.
. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990.
Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 18602000. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2004.
Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the
Form of Fiction. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
Day, Timothy. A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2002.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1995.
Denisoff, Dennis. Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, 18501950. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Dikoyitskaya, Margaret. Visual Culture: the Study of the Visual after the Cultural
Turn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.
Farwell, Beatrice. The Cult of Images: Baudelaire and the 19th-Century Media
Explosion. Santa Barbara: UCSB Art Museum, 1977.
Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery, eds. The Book History Reader. New
York: Routledge, 2002.
. An Introduction to Book History. New York, Routledge, 2005.
Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP,
1999.
Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986.
. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market
Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 17401915. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 2003.
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2006.
. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the
Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 17
Gunning, Tom. Tracing the Individual Body AKA Photography, Detectives, Early
Cinema and the Body of Modernity. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life.
Ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Leo Charney. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Grau, Oliver. MediaArtHistories. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2007.
Griffths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
Groth, Helen. Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia. New York: Oxford
UP, 2003.
Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts. Hutchinson, 1964.
Hassan, Robert and Julian Thomas, eds. The New Media Theory Reader.
Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays.
Trans. William Lovitt. New York : Harper & Row, 1977.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Hughes, John. Ecstatic Sound: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas
Hardy. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2001.
Hughes, Linda. SIDEWAYS!Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.
Plenary Lecture, NAVSA Conference, University of Victoria, Canada, October
11, 2007.
Innis, Harold Adams. Empire and Communications. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1972.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Jenkins, Alice. Space and the March of Mind: Literature and the Physical
Sciences in Britain, 18151850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New
York: New York UP, 2006.
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998.
Jordon, John O. and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace:
Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Keenan, Thomas and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, eds. New Media, Old Media: A
History and Theory Reader, New York: Routledge, 2006.
King, Andrew and John Plunkett, eds. Victorian Print Media: A Reader. New York
and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer with
Chris Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.
Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Sicle
illustrated Books. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1995.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century 18
. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens: Ohio
UP, 2002.
Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP, 2004.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005.
Lyons, James and John Plunkett eds. Multimedia Histories: From the Magic
Lantern to the Internet. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2007.
Manovich, Len. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001.
Marks, Laura. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 2002.
McGann, Jerome. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton UP, 1993.
. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
. Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon,
1996.
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory
of Effects. Corte Madera: Ginko P, 1967.
. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York and Toronto:
McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information
Systems. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1986.
. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1994.
. What Do Pictures Want? The Life and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2005.
Morley, David ed. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London
and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Nead, Lynda, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography and Film c. 1900.
London and New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.
. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century
London. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.
Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the
Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain,
18001910. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2008.
Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George
Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m


w
w
w
.
a
s
h
g
a
t
e
.
c
o
m

Introduction 19
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Meters. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry.
Ed. Joseph Bristow. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Rappaport, Erika. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of Londons West
End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000.
Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Stafford, Barbara. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a
Screen. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2002.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
London: Methuen, 1986.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins, eds. Rethinking Media Change: the Aesthetics
of Transition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2003.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 18801920.
New York: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Trotter, David. Stereoscopy: Modernism and the Haptic. Critical Quarterly
46.4 (2004): 3858.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. London: Verso, 1997.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.
Williams, Linda. Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the Carnal
Density of Vision. Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice
Petro. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 341.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.
. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980.
Wood, Jane. Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. Oxford and New York:
Oxford UP, 2001.