Romantic Capabilities discusses the relationship between popular new media uses of literary texts. Devising and modelling an original critical methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, this volume contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals medial capabilities of the text that can transform how we understand its significance for the original historical context for which it was created.
Following an introductory theoretical chapter that explains the book's unconventional approach to the archive, Romantic Capabilities analyzes 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 3D 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. The result is a book that reveals Blake to be an important early theorist of viral media and the law, Scott's novels to be studies in vision that helped give rise to modern immersive media, and Austenian realism to be a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends. It offers insight into the politics of virality, the dependence of immersion on a sense of frame, and the extent to which eighteenth-century landscape gardening anticipated Deleuzian ideas of the "virtual" by granting existence to reality's as-yet-unrealized capabilities.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198862369
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 638 g
Dimensions: 236 x 163 x 24 mm
I suspect that Scott and Austen scholars will find Goode's work on those figures similarly engaging and similarly challenging. Goode provokes argument in the best possible way and, in the process, opens up the field of literary studies to new possible readings. - James Rovira, Keiser University and ValenciaCollege, Blake
Romantic Capabilities does certainly offer, in both instance and principles, genuine interest to any students of the period and its heritage. - Ian Dennis, University of Ottawa, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Without reading Romantic texts simply as precursors of new media, Goode helps one see how their possibilities are not bound to their original purport and shape. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. - N. Birns, New York University, CHOICE
Goode's important book speaks to a growing trend to recognize the theoretical and historical capabilities of placing our own media moment into conversations with the nineteenth century and, in doing so, he invites us to uncover additional capabilities within Romantic and media studies. - Lindsey Eckert, British Association of Romantic Studies
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