scholarly journals TONO-BUNGAY AND BURROUGHS WELLCOME: BRANDING IMPERIAL POPULAR MEDICINE

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Popular Medicine ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Patent Medicines ◽  
Fin De Siècle

H. G. Wells's 1908 novel Tono-Bungay is a remarkable concoction, binding together characters and setting out of Dickens, sparkling imitations of fin-de-siécle commodity culture and new media, bitter social satire inflected by Wells's socialism, fascination with invention and flight, and murderous imperial adventure. Readers, though often seduced by the wit and precision of Wells's depiction of patent medicines and their advertisements, have not known whether to read the narrative as anti-Bildungsroman, Condition of England novel, science fiction, or imperial romance. It is no wonder that many critics have labeled this novel a failure.

The Ache of Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-63
Author(s):  
Jed Rasula
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Slapstick Comedy

The “ache of modernism” registered convulsive social transformations of the process of modernity as they crested in the fin de siècle. Early in the twentieth century, artists began embracing the future as provocation to a new artistic reckoning. In the process they rejected inherited protocols of presentation and representation. At the same time, they responded affirmatively to the challenges of new media, particularly cinema. But recursions from the distant past, like the commedia dell’arte, proved equally influential. These combined sources of replenishment from past and future inspired modernists in all the arts to assume an acrobatic attitude, affirming art as athletic prerogative commensurate with such popular enterprises as vaudeville and slapstick comedy in cinema.

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