Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848

ISBN-13: 9780198830429 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 368 str.

C. J. Pettitt (Professor of Nineteenth-C

Opis

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815-1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. This is the first book in a three-part series which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War and will move from London to the global. Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all the three volumes. It suggests that the growing importance and determining power of the form of seriality is a result of the parallel and connected development of a news culture alongside an emergent popular culture of historicism. Through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, shows, and new forms of mediation, the past and the contemporary moment are emerging into public visibility together. The increasingly insistent rhythm of the serial which reorganises time and recalibrates and rescales the social is preparing the way for the revolutions which are the subject of the next book, Serial Revolutions: 1848. Rather than offering rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', this series takes as its focus the development of communications technologies and tracks their impact on the imagination of time, history, and virtuality. Serial Forms is able to offer new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott, Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell by placing their work back into the messy serial print and shows culture from which it originally appeared. Through the serial form the social becomes recognised as political for the first time and Serial Forms points towards the crucial importance of the 'failed' 1848 revolutions in Britain as well as in Continental Europe.

Recenzje

The greatest strength of the book is its meticulous research of periodicals,...Serial Forms offers a refreshingly material engagement with affect studies.

O autorze

Clare Pettitt has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has taught at the universities of Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge, and King's College London. Pettitt is currently Grace 2 Chair at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.