This is the first major work to bring insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory. In so doing, the book charts a compelling and innovative history of theories of reading.

Bringing insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory, this book points to a split between literary study that regards reading as a reducibly mental activity, and a tradition reaching back to antiquity which assumed that reading was not only about sense-making but also about sensation.

In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, relate both to previous or outmoded media and to what we now refer to as New Media?

This collection sets out to examine these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions and diverse forms of entertainment, demarcating their sometimes parallel and sometimes more closely conjoined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and...