Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity

Book excerpt: This book maps out the temporal and geographic coordinates of the trope of sensationalism in the long nineteenth century through a comparative approach. Not only juxtaposing different geographical areas (Europe, Asia and Oceania), this volume also disperses its history over a longue durée, allowing readers to perceive the hidden and often unacknowledged continuities throughout a period that is often reduced to the confines of the national disciplines of literature, art, and cultural studies. Providing a wide range of methodological approaches from the fields of literary studies, art history, sociology of literature, and visual culture, this collection offers indispensable examples of the relation between literature and several other media. Topics include the rhetorical tropes of popular culture, the material culture of clothing, the lived experience of performance as a sub-text of literature and painting, and the redefinition of spatiality and temporality in theory, art, and literature.