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Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media

Online ISBN:
9780191894916
Print ISBN:
9780198862369
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media

Mike Goode
Mike Goode
Associate Professor, English Department, Syracuse University
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Published online:
21 January 2021
Published in print:
1 October 2020
Online ISBN:
9780191894916
Print ISBN:
9780198862369
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

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