Can you hear the writing on the wall?
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Can you hear the writing on the wall? Richard Menke: Literature, print culture, and media technologies, 1880–1900: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture, vol. 119 edited by Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 250 pp, HB Laura Søvsø Thomasen1 Published online: 15 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Print culture encompasses many things: it deals with technology, media, journalism, printing, distribution, text, literature and many more aspects. In his book Literature, Print Culture and Media Technologies, 1880–1900, Richard Menke succeeds in illustrating how technology, media and literature met in print culture in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There can be no doubt that taking into account all different aspects of print culture is no easy task, and when you have turned the last page of Menke’s book, you feel at ease and well informed in what must have been part of “media circus” anno 1880-1900 presented through the three main foci of technology, media and literature. From the outset of the book, Menke focuses on the relationship between sound and writing as an integrate part of the nineteenth century. Pointing out that writing was, by far, the most important media and the superior format during the nineteenth century, the new “-graphies” of the era (like photography and telegraphy) were invented with the written word in mind. From a modern point of view, however, the focus has often been on the great inventions in sound like the phonograph and telephone. Menke uses his introduction and the first chapter of his book to describe the, for a lack of a better word, mixed media that ends up constituting the media landscape of the period. He discusses the phonoautograph, an invention that preceded Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell’s inventions in sound by a generation. The phonoautograph was invented in the 1850s by French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Mandeville and is the earliest example of recorded sound (which can be heard on the website firstsounds.org). But the machine was not invented with sound in mind, but rather as an attempt to find faster and more efficient ways to directly translate human speech into text, thus bypassing typesetting. Likewise, photography
* Laura Søvsø Thomasen [email protected] 1
The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
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was initially pursued in order to be able to take pictures of text without having to go through the printing process. These histories of the phonoautograph and other media technologies of the period highlight the complexity of the media landscape in the last two decades of the century; they also illustrate how fiction and journalism changed with technological inventions. To demonstrate the interwoven connections between the developments in technology and the media, Menke presents the case of the shooting of US President James A. Garfield in 1881. The shooting and subsequent state of the President until his death almost 3 months later
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