The search for immediacy, the desire to feel directly connected to people or events, has been a driving force in American literature and media culture for the past two centuries. This book offers the first in-depth study of literary immediacy effects. It shows how the heightened reality effects of photography, film, and television inspired American writers to create new literary forms that would enhance their readers' sense of immediate participation in the world. The study combines close readings of Emerson, Whitman, Stein, Dos Passos, Coover, Foster Wallace, and DeLillo with detailed considerations of visual media to open up a new perspective on literary innovation and the ongoing cultural quest for increased immediacy. It argues that we can better understand how American literature develops when we consider experiments with literary form not only in literary and cultural contexts but also in relation to the emergence of new media, their immediacy effects, and the larger changes in social life that they manifest and provoke.

'Media archaeology from the literary inside out: immediacy theory, scrupulously pursued from photography’s transparent eyeball to the universal tube, from transcendentalism through cinematic montage to the ethos of tele-presencing. Emerson and Whitman speak to Stein and Coover, Dos Passos to DeLillo and Wallace, as never before across the very leaps of technological advance in an intermedial evolution of American poetics. Schaefer’s adjustable lens enhances her panoramic traveling shot of this terrain with verbal close-ups that lock in an immediate - and indispensable - focus all their own. Entering a lively scholarly dialogue on competing media, her book canvasses literary voices that, even when those of familiar suspects, have unexpected news to bring. This engrossing study will be of interest equally to students of American literary history, media theory, the tradition of ekphrastic writing, and the video-inflected discontinuities of postmodernist narrative in an epoch of visual literacy.'

Garrett Stewart - University of Iowa and author of Transmedium and Cinemachines

'American Literature and Immediacy is at once grand in its aim of tracing the multidimensional concept of immediacy across visual media and a century and a half of American literature, and focused in its nuanced and compelling close readings of well-chosen case studies that represent some of the most intellectually earnest and formally ambitious literary responses to new visual media. I warmly welcome its significant contribution to literary studies and comparative media analyses and its impressive examination of a major concept in American culture - immediacy.'

Marcy J. Dinius - DePaul University, Chicago and author of The Camera and the Press

‘General readers and scholars would feel informed of the immediacy of American literature needed in photography, film, and television, and understand the difference between the three media categories and why immediacy is needed to bring all three of them together.’

Sydney Spencer Source: Communication Booknotes Quarterly