Description
Book SynopsisShortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award
Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.
Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outsid
Table of Contents
Introduction | 1
Constellations
1. Techno-Magism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image | 33
2. Two Pipers and the Cliché of Romanticism | 53
3. The Gothic Zany | 78
4. Prometheus Unbound and Commemorative Thought | 102
5. After Life: Byron’s Manfred and the Umwelt | 123
Cuts
6. Play Time: Austen, Byron, and Mary Shelley | 149
7. Chthonic Michael: Smithson, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Wordsworth | 175
8. Dream Animals | 196
Acknowledgments | 223
Index | 225
