Description: Operating at the intersection where new technology meets literature, this collection discovers the relationship among image, sound, and touch in the long nineteenth century. The chapters speak to the special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring the important interconnections of science, technology, and art at the historical moment when media was being theorized, debated, and scrutinized. Famous works such as Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Shelley's Frankenstein are discussed alongside a range of lesser-known literary, scientific, and pornographic writings.
Review Quotes: 'A lively and wide-ranging collection that shows the striking variety of recent work in Victorian media studies.' Leah Price, Harvard University, USA 'A must for libraries developing collections in 19th-century literature and/or media studies...Recommended.' Choice '... it is undoubtedly the broad engagement with popular and avant-garde culture, and the inclusion of technologies of production, destruction, replication, communication, transmission and reception that make the book so useful as a resource for researchers approaching the topic from a range of literary and cultural contexts, as well as a starting point for further study in the field. Though wide-ranging, the readings are never lacking in interest, managing to convey insightful, sophisticated and convincing arguments in accessible prose.' British Society for Literature and Science