Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the "romance revival" of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on authors such as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies, Daly argues that these adventure narratives provided a narrative of cultural change at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the "new imperialism." The presence of a genre such as romance within modernism, he claims, should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the "crash," or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.

Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the "crash," or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.

This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political consequences of this Leap in the Dark, authors and artists began to re-evaluate their own role in a democratic society that was also becoming more urban and more anonymous. While some fantasized about ways of capturing and holding the attention of the masses, others preferred to make art and literature more exclusive, to shut out the crowd. One path led to Sensation; the other to aestheticism,...

In this provocative book, Nicholas Daly tracks the cultural effects of the population explosion of the nineteenth century, the 'demographic transition' to the modern world. As the crowded cities of Paris, London and New York went through similar transformations, a set of shared narratives and images of urban life circulated among them, including fantasies of urban catastrophe, crime dramas, and tales of haunted public transport, refracting the hell that is other people. In the visual arts, sentimental genre pictures appeared that condensed the urban masses into a handful of vulnerable...