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 alongue 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.

Alberto Gabriele is the author ofReading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia andSensationalismand the forthcomingThe Emergence of Precinema: Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination. He is working on a project on the global circulation of print culture in the 1860s and has been, most recently, a Macgeorge fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: Transnational Currents, Intermedial Trajectories. A Global Nineteenth-Century Approach

I. Sensational Tactics in the Nineteenth-Century

Chapter 1

James Brophy, Irony and Popular Politics in Germany, 1800-1850

Chapter 2

Stefanie Lethbridge, The Horror of Clothing and the Clothing of Horror: Material and Meaning in Gothic and Sensation Fiction

Chapter 3

Anthony Laube, Adelaide, Sensationalism and the Development of New Journalism in the Early History of the South Australian Press

Chapter 4

Efrat Pashut, "Urban Perils and the Sensational Bicycle: Text-Image Dynamics in the Victorian MagazineCycling, 1894-96

II. Transmedial Trajectories: the Vanishing Act of Performance

Chapter 5

Hélène Valance, Destructive Re-creations: Spectacles of Urban Destruction in Turn-of-the-Century United States

Chapter 6

Matthieu Letourneux, The Magicians Box of Tricks: Fantômas, Popular Literature, and the the Spectacular imagination

Chapter 7

Katharina Rein, Sawing People in Half: Sensationalist Magic Tricks and the Gendered Space of Perfor-mance in the Early Twentieth Century

Sabine Müller, Sensational Voices. Premodern Theatricality, Early Cinema, and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Fin-de-siècle Vienna

III. Visualizing the space of industrial modernity

Chapter 9

Michael Devine, The Whole Thing (and Other Things): from Panorama to Attraction in Stephen Cranes The Open Boat, Ashcan Painting, and Early Cinema

Chapter 10

Ester Coen, Urban Metaphysics versus Metropolitan Dynamisms: The Italian Vision before WW1

Anat Messing Marcus, Spatiality and Temporality in Benjamin and Adorno

Chapter 12

Aubrey Tang, The Sensibilities of Semicolonial Shanghai: A Phenomenological Study of the Short Stories by Liu Na'ou

Bibliography