News from everywhere: fiction and the Victorian world wide web

Book section : Chapter

There is a general agreement regarding the relationship between the technologies of media/communications and global modernity - that the epochal developments in the former are both indices and drivers of the latter. But as Friedrich Kittler, Stuart Hall and others have also long argued from a variety of different critical positions, modern media & communications embody and enable specific kinds of power, domination and inequality - social, political, economic, cultural and aesthetic. Many of these media networks were enabled by, and enabled, the Victorian world order. How did Victorian world literature register such the presence of such networks and their work of mediation? In this essay, I range across a variety of genres - crime fiction, science fiction, sensation fiction and adventure tales - to show how the worlding of Victorian writing was achieved by enfolding media, mediation and empire into its form and content.

Authors: Mukherjee, P

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Routledge
• Host title: Routledge Companion to Global Victorian Literature and Culture
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter