| Contents |
1. Introduction : Media Behaviors; or The New Messages of Old Media -- Part I. Viral Blake -- 2. Blakespotting -- 3. The Joy of Looking : What William Blake's Pictures Want -- Part II. Immersive Scott -- 4. History in Three Dimensions : Panorama, Stereoscopy, and Scott's Novel Perspective -- Part III. Virtual Austen -- 5. Letters from Austenland : The Designs of Fanfiction -- 6. Capability Jane : The Ecological Designs of Austenian Realism. |
| Summary |
Romantic Capabilities discusses the relationship between popular new media uses of literary texts. Devising and modelling an original critical methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, this volume contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals medial capabilities of the text that can transform how we understand its significance for the original historical context for which it was created. Following an introductory theoretical chapter that explains the book's unconventional approach to the archive, Romantic Capabilities analyzes significant popular "media behaviors" exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake's pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and 3D photographers to Walter Scott's historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen's novels and their imaginary country estates. The result is a book that reveals Blake to be an important early theorist of viral media and the law, Scott's novels to be studies in vision that helped give rise to modern immersive media, and Austenian realism to be a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends. It offers insight into the politics of virality, the dependence of immersion on a sense of frame, and the extent to which eighteenth-century landscape gardening anticipated Deleuzian ideas of the "virtual" by granting existence to reality's as-yet-unrealized capabilities. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages [261]-285) and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2020944361 |
| ISBN | 9780198862369 (hardback) |
| ISBN | 0198862369 (hardback) |
