Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

__Romantic Mediations__ investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism's role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by--while simultaneously shaping considerably--new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media. Contents 8 List of Illustrations 10 Acknowledgments 14 Introduction 18 1 Photographing Byron’s Hand 36 Byron’s Hero Worship and the Publication History of Ode to Napoleon 39 Talbot’s “Tribute of [Photographic] Science to [Romantic] Poetry” 43 Byron’s Flourish: The Photographic (Re)Production of Romantic Byronism 51 Controlling the Image: Byron, Napoleon, Talbot, and Romantic Visual Culture 55 2 Keats and the Phonograph 62 Romantic Medicine and the (Im)Mediacy of Keatsian Listening 65 (Listening to) Voices in Keatsian Verse 70 (Listening to) Phonographic Voices 76 Keats Forever Listening; Listening to Keats Forever 87 3 Blake’s Moving Images 92 Blakean Movements 96 “Labour[ing] into Life”: From the Relief Etching Process to The Laocoön 99 Toward a Blakean Network Aesthetics 107 From Contemporary Network Theory to Vital Romantic Media: Blake on/and Film 115 4 Media, Information, and Frankenstein 132 British Romantic Biomedia, the Discourse of the Sciences of Electricity, and Frankenstein 137 “Real Information” and Unreal Bodies in Frankenstein 142 Virtuality and the Structure of Frankenstein 146 Mothers, Motherboards, and Shelley’s Media Monster 149 Coda Toward a Romantic Media Archaeology 152 Notes 158 Works Cited 186 Index 206 Finalist in the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Social Sciences categoryRomantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism's role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by—while simultaneously shaping considerably—new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media. "Romantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism?s role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by?while simultaneously shaping considerably - new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media." -- Publisher's description