Long before the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, people found innovative ways to use literature, art, and technology to interact with, connect to, and visualize their place in an expanding world. This course will examine how works of culture confronted what were arguably the two fundamental social facts of the nineteenth century: technology and the empire. As we examine the major media forms of Victorian modernity — early photography, novels, drama, print journalism, and visual art—we will pay special attention to how those forms began to imagine the domestic in relation to “the globe”: a metaphor that emerged in the nineteenth century to describe a networked world not unlike our own, as diverse and cosmopolitan as it was oppressive and violent. How did categories of class, race, gender, and personhood change in this vast new framework? What role did media play in mobilizing those changes? 

In this course, we will consider literature in the nineteenth-century as a social and active form of media that engaged with and responded to other cultural forms of communication. Framing our discussion around a long view of “social media” we will speculate on the origins of our own contemporary media practices. We will begin by discussing the invention of photography and its relationship to both scientific empiricism and visual art. We will excavate photography’s history and the ways in which photography’s “authenticity” was used in nefarious ways to visualize and reveal class, race, and gender. We will examine photographic and technological turns in drama, tracing the ways in which new theatrical practices traveled across the Atlantic, mobilizing democratic negotiations between audiences, the stage, and the nation. We will explore photography’s relationship to literature and the cultural movements of realism and sensation, investigating the ways in which this new medium put pressure on the novel itself and changed the ways in which readers engaged with these texts. And finally, we will ask whether the Victorian obsession with media may account for the twenty-first century obsession with re-presenting Victorian texts and themes in our most contemporary forms of media.

This course fulfills the following English major/minor requirement: Identity/Difference