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Introduction

Inventing Media and Their Meanings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2019

Richard Menke
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Summary

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Introduction
  • Richard Menke, University of Georgia
  • Book: Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
  • Online publication: 30 September 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108631884.001
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  • Introduction
  • Richard Menke, University of Georgia
  • Book: Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
  • Online publication: 30 September 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108631884.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Richard Menke, University of Georgia
  • Book: Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
  • Online publication: 30 September 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108631884.001
Available formats
×