Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity

A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective

Alberto Gabriele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137561480
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: Transnational Currents, Intermedial Trajectories—A Global Nineteenth-Century Approach
• Part I: Sensational Tactics in the Nineteenth Century
• Irony and Popular Politics in Germany, 1800–1850
• The Horror of Clothing and the Clothing of Horror: Material and Meaning in Gothic and Sensation Fiction
• Adelaide, Sensationalism and the Development of New Journalism in the Early History of the South Australian Press
• Urban Perils and the Sensational Bicycle: Text-Image Dynamics in the Victorian Magazine Cycling, 1894–1896
• Part II: Transmedial Trajectories: The Vanishing Act of Performance
• Destructive Re-Creations: Spectacles of Urban Destruction in Turn-of-­the-Century USA
• The Magician’s Box of Tricks: Fantômas, Popular Literature, and the Spectacular Imagination
• Sawing People in Half: Sensationalist Magic Tricks and the  Role of Women on Stage in the Early Twentieth Century
• Sensational Voices: Premodern Theatricality, Early Cinema, and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Fin-de-siècle Vienna
• Part III: Visualizing the Space of Industrial Modernity
• The Whole Thing (and Other Things): From Panorama to Attraction in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” Ashcan Painting, and Early Cinema
• Urban Metaphysics versus Metropolitan Dynamisms: The Italian Vision Before the First World War
• Spatiality and Temporality in Benjamin and Adorno
• The Sensibilities of Semicolonial Shanghai: A Phenomenological Study of the Short Stories by Liu Na’ou
• Index