Book contents
- Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A Message on All Channels
- Chapter 2 Fictions of the Victorian Telephone
- Chapter 3 New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street
- Chapter 4 The Sinking of the Triple-Decker
- Chapter 5 Writers of Books
- Chapter 6 Words Fail
- Chapter 7 A Connecticut Yankee’s Media Wars
- After Words
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 6 - Words Fail
Occulting Media into Information
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2019
- Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A Message on All Channels
- Chapter 2 Fictions of the Victorian Telephone
- Chapter 3 New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street
- Chapter 4 The Sinking of the Triple-Decker
- Chapter 5 Writers of Books
- Chapter 6 Words Fail
- Chapter 7 A Connecticut Yankee’s Media Wars
- After Words
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Today, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is the best-known literary work that highlights the late nineteenth-century’s panoply of print and non-print media. This chapter analyzes how this focus allows the novel to set up a dialectic that has gone unremarked in previous critical accounts of it. In Dracula, gaps, losses, and incomplete translations between media become a source of uncanniness, producing the effect of the unreal and the paranormal. Yet the novel also presents the richness and particularity of multiple media giving way to the typewriter, a device that is supposed to yield that quintessentially modern substance, demediated information. With its vampiric power to feed on original media while converting and occulting them, the typewriter allows the novel to liquidate their aura of originality while keeping it hauntingly available, even undead.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900Many Inventions, pp. 137 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019