Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge Advances in Transmedia Studies)

This volume provides engaging accounts with transmedia practices in the long nineteenth century and offers model analyses of Victorian media (e.g., theater, advertising, books, games, newspapers) alongside the technological, economic, and cultural conditions under which they emerged in the Anglophone world.

By exploring engagement tactics and forms of audience participation, the book affords insight into the role that social agents – e.g., individual authors, publishing houses, theatre show producers, lithograph companies, toy manufacturers, newspaper syndicates, or advertisers – played in the production, distribution, and consumption of Victorian media. It considers such examples as Sherlock Holmes, Kewpie Dolls, media forms and practices such as cut-outs, popular lectures, telephone conversations or early theater broadcasting, and such authors as Nellie Bly, Mark Twain, and Walter Besant, offering insight into the variety of transmedia practices present in the long nineteenth century.

The book brings together methods and theories from comics studies, communication and media studies, English and American studies, narratology and more, and proposes fresh ways to think about transmediality. Though the target audiences are students, teachers, and scholars in the humanities, the book will also resonate with non-academic readers interested in how media contents are produced, disseminated, and consumed, and with what implications.

Christina Meyer is Associate Professor of American Studies, currently working at the TU Braunschweig, Germany. She is the author of Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid (2019).

Monika Pietrzak-Franger is Professor of British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has published on adaptation, transmediality, medicine and culture, (neo-)Victorianism, science, and globalization.