History in Three Dimensions

The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas and stereoscopic photographs—comment on and draw attention to their differences as media through their respective uses of Walter Scott’s novels and poems, and, in turn, how these medial differences bring into relief the aesthetic and philosophical novelty of Scott’s own efforts to write visually. To make its argument, the chapter draws on a wide variety of archives and forms of evidence, including: period guidebooks to panoramas; the histories of media technologies like camera obscuras, linear perspective, and stereoscopes; Victorian stereographs of Scotland, especially by George Washington Wilson; readings of visually evocative passages in Scott’s Waverley, Ivanhoe, and The Fair Maid of Perth; Eugène Delacroix’s painting Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe; and Romantic writings on optics and vision, including Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft and his friend David Brewster’s scientific treatises on monocular and binocular vision.

Introduction: Media Behaviors; or The New Messages of Old Media

Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways that texts were already about their relationship to media, the chapter develops a methodology that relies on the specificity of a text’s medial afterlife to open avenues of inquiry into the text’s significance in earlier historical contexts and media ecologies. The chapter contends that the vehicles for how a text culturally persists include the contingent relationship the text bears to media, a contingency memorialized in how it hypermedially uses, refers to, and comments on its lack of immediacy. The chapter previews the book’s findings when its new method of historicist reception study is applied to specific medial afterlives of William Blake’s, Walter Scott’s, and Jane Austen’s writings. It also explains how its methodology relies on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual substrate present in any reality, an idea whose Romantic antecedent is the notion of “capabilities.”

Capability Jane

The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that Austen theorizes the novel form as a design medium wherein narrative is just a contingent ecological experiment.

Letters from Austenland

The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become hypermedial figures for realist Austen fanfiction’s own place-making practices and its media platforms.

Epilogue

The epilogue contends that the book’s methodology politically challenges canons by taking seriously the media commentaries and medial savviness of genres and texts that tend to be denigrated as “derivative” on account of their secondary relationship to canonical texts. It then proposes that the markedly different medial afterlives that Walter Scott’s novels and Jane Austen’s novels have enjoyed in film and in fanfiction derive in part from differences in historical consciousness that their respective fictions promote. Whereas fanfiction has been medially hailed by Austen’s novels, Scott’s novels survive in the project of living history museums. The epilogue concludes with a reading of William Blake’s proverb “As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.”

Blakespotting

The chapter argues that the unpredictable viral behavior of William Blake’s proverbs in contemporary culture is critically and politically instructive. The widespread practice of citing Blake proverbs across various media platforms reveals the radical potential that Blake’s multi-media poetry possessed within the “original” historical contexts in which he wrote. Understanding the proverb form as a viral medium that spreads through a population’s contradictory desires for self-regulation illuminates proverbs’ centrality to Blake’s art and its challenge to the regulatory power of laws. The intellectual groundwork for this challenge lay in eighteenth-century practices of collecting national proverbs and in historical research into the Book of Proverbs. The chapter closes by analyzing how Blake’s proverbs relate to computer worms and also how they inform the ways that Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man laments America’s history of missed political opportunities.

The Joy of Looking

The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of an audience elite enough to rise to the challenge of the sublime but in its viral medial appeals to audiences’ heterogeneous tastes for beauty. Individual Blake pictures have long tended to circulate apart from the composite, multi-media art to which they are supposedly integral. The chapter argues that this tendency activates formal potentials in the art. Blake worked at a time when aesthetic philosophers conceived of aesthetic experience, particularly of “the beautiful,” as an organic legislative force. The chapter argues for the potential radicalism of Blake’s multi-media art for its own age—and for others—on the grounds that it turns “the beautiful” into a legislative force designed to activate and exploit the disintegrated, heterogeneous wants of the populations that experience it.