| My dissertation examines the invention and the rise of the picture postcard at the turn of the twentieth century and how the postcard, as a new communication technology, interacts with literature, particularly the novel form. It recovers a historical moment in which the postcard is both revolutionary and controversial. The immense, and international, popularity of the picture postcard starting in the 1890s caused certain cultural critics to lament the "death of letter-writing." Implicit in this critique is the fear of the death of the novel, which began its life in epistolary guise. Each of the postcard's essential features, its open form, its limited writing space, its spectacular image, its lower cost, is represented within the novel as corresponding to huge societal changes. Uproar over the postcard in particular mirrors anxieties about the changing nature of the literary marketplace including the role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity, an increasing dependence on new technologies, the rise of mass-media, and the diminution of the world. I argue that representations of postcards in the following works overtly defamiliarize them and help mask how the changes they represent have already begun to be incorporated into the older medium of the novel.;Chapter one deals with the postcard as a symbol of the democratization of travel and travel writing, taking William Dean Howells and the businessman cum travel writer Samuel Gamble Bayne as examples. The increasingly competitive and professionalized literary marketplace of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century forces even "serious" authors into finding new ways to sell their work through a savvy positioning vis-a-vis new mass cultural forms. In chapter two, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country and lesser-known Anne Douglas Sedgwick's Franklin Kane both have their (anti)heroines whirling through Europe, aligning the new medium of the postcard with the figure of the New Woman. Like the postcard, the New Woman is half personal communication and half mass-produced commodity. They both threaten the breakdown of authentic, readable relationships but promise liberation from stultified, antiquated forms. In chapter three, E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread and popular mass-fiction writer Herbert Flowerdew's The Seventh Postcard demonstrate how the postcard's ease of use actually invites its misuse from the very beginning. Postcard crimes seem to be all the more shocking for the postcard's innocuous nature but it is the very belief in that nature that makes the crimes possible. As the postcard creates the illusion of openness and intimacy, the recipient falls prey to subtle deceptions. My final chapter examines the concept of the colonial postcard, first brought to widespread critical attention by Malek Alloula, and moves beyond the exotic visual subject matter. The postcard, in its desire to encompass all subjects, functions in ways that are symbolically analogous to colonialism. What surfaces are fears that the postcard will finally empty even its sender of all specificity. In Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat," the act of subjecting an obscure English village to a steady flow of media attention, postcarding it, effectively colonizes it. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the uncanny similarities between the vampire and the vampire hunters point to the threat to British culture that has always been present. |
