Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism

Investigates the ways in which new technologies and theories of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media engage with a diverse set of texts by British Romantic writers.

Finalist in the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Social Sciences category

Romantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism's role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by-while simultaneously shaping considerably-new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media.