Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity

This book maps out the temporal and geographic coordinates of the trope of sensationalism in the long nineteenth century through a comparative approach. Not only juxtaposing different geographical areas (Europe, Asia and Oceania), this volume also disperses its history over a longue durée, allowing readers to perceive the hidden and often unacknowledged continuities throughout a period that is often reduced to the confines of the national disciplines of literature, art, and cultural studies. Providing a wide range of methodological approaches from the fields of literary studies, art history, sociology of literature, and visual culture, this collection offers indispensable examples of the relation between literature and several other media. Topics include the rhetorical tropes of popular culture, the material culture of clothing, the lived experience of performance as a sub-text of literature and painting, and the redefinition of spatiality and temporality in theory, art, and literature.

Expands discussion beyond literature through chapters on art, clothing, and other forms of media and visual culture Moves beyond geographical borders with topics ranging from North America to Asia Traces the concept of sensationalism through a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach.

Autorentext

Alberto Gabriele is the author of Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism and the forthcoming The Emergence of Precinema: Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination. He is working on a project on the global circulation of print culture in the 1860s and has been, most recently, a Macgeorge fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Inhalt
Introduction: Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: Transnational Currents, Intermedial Trajectories. A Global Nineteenth-Century Approach.- I. Sensational Tactics in the Nineteenth-Century.- James Brophy, Irony and Popular Politics in Germany, 1800-1850.- Stefanie Lethbridge, The Horror of Clothing and the Clothing of Horror: Material and Meaning in Gothic and Sensation Fiction.- Anthony Laube, Adelaide, Sensationalism and the Development of New Journalism in the Early History of the South Australian Press.- Efrat Pashut, "Urban Perils and the Sensational Bicycle: Text-Image Dynamics in the Victorian Magazine Cycling, 1894-96.- II. Transmedial Trajectories: the Vanishing Act of Performance.- Hélène Valance, Destructive Re-creations: Spectacles of Urban Destruction in Turn-of-the-Century United States.- Matthieu Letourneux, The Magician's Box of Tricks: Fantômas, Popular Literature, and the the Spectacular imagination.- Katharina Rein, Sawing People in Half: Sensationalist Magic Tricks and the Gendered Space of Performance in the Early Twentieth Century.- Sabine Müller, Sensational Voices. Premodern Theatricality, Early Cinema, and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Fin-de-siècle Vienna.- III. Visualizing the space of industrial modernity.- Michael Devine, The Whole Thing (and Other Things): from Panorama to Attraction in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat,' Ashcan Painting, and Early Cinema.- Ester Coen, Urban Metaphysics versus Metropolitan Dynamisms: The Italian Vision before WW1.- Anat Messing Marcus, Spatiality and Temporality in Benjamin and Adorno.- Aubrey Tang, The Sensibilities of Semicolonial Shanghai: A Phenomenological Study of the Short Stories by Liu Na'ou.- Notes on Contributors.- Bibliography.- Index