A Medial History of Romanticism: Print and Performance in Britain, 1790--1820

In the crowded multimedia moment of the early twenty-first century, new digital media are challenging the once dominant position of print. For decades, journalists, scholars, and consumer research groups have forecasted the end of printed media. In addition to formal studies, most of us, myself included, can offer plenty of anecdotal evidence of print's displacement. I now use an e-reader for all of my leisure reading and some of my academic research; I recently changed my New York Times subscription to digital only; and each semester, more and more e-readers wheedle their way into the literature classes I teach.;My dissertation asks what our current terminology and awareness of media shifts can tell us about past periods of change. I believe that British Romanticism provides an especially rich case study because it marks a crucial moment when print was the new medium, the one that was doing the jostling as it situated itself among pre-existing media of circulation. Indeed, Romanticism has come down to us as a period of print, a period defined by literary innovation and proliferation. When we think of Romanticism, we often think first of the Romantics, more specifically, the Romantic poets. Names such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron loom large over the period. While poetry is perhaps seen as the genre of Romanticism, new quantitative studies have shown that the late 1780s and 1790s witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of novels published annually. Subsequently, critical narratives of Romanticism tend to focus on these genres and the new dissemination possibilities provided by print.;However, it is important to recognize that print's rise suggests that there exists a corresponding fall or diminishment. This dissertation focuses on what print has been depicted as pushing against, displacing, and forcing to the margins. In order to do so, I believe we need a new type of history, one that is larger than print; larger than literary history; one that moves beyond aesthetics and genres; one that recognizes and reconsiders the jostling back and forth between different modes of circulation: a medial history.;Building on recent scholarly interest in media theory, I contend that the Romantic era should be seen an early multimedia moment during which the proliferation of print forced a re-hierarchizing of the media of circulation. Although the concept of media specificity is usually associated with the twentieth century, Romantic authors were forced to reconsider and renegotiate the media in which their work circulated, including print, painting, the stage, the public lecture, and recitation. In turn, scholars must reconsider their narratives of rising and falling. Showing how the question of the "correct" medium of dissemination became a central concern for Romantic authors and an object of discourse in Romantic literature, my dissertation recasts four of the period's defining debates as medial controversies.