The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century

How did we arrive at our contemporary consumer media economy? Why are we now fixated on screens, imbibing information that constantly expires, and longing for more direct or authentic kinds of experience? The Mediated Mind answers these questions by revisiting a previous media revolution, the nineteenth-century explosion of mass print. Like our own smartphone screens, printed paper and imprinted objects touched the most intimate regions of nineteenth-century life. The rise of this printed ephemera, and its new information economy, generated modern consumer experiences such as voracious collecting and curating, fantasies of disembodied mental travel, and information addiction. Susan Zieger demonstrates how the nineteenth century established affective, psychological, social, and cultural habits of media consumption that we still experience, even as pixels supersede paper. Revealing the history of our own moment, The Mediated Mind challenges the commonplace assumption that our own new media lack a past, or that our own experiences are unprecedented.

Author: Susan Zieger
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 06/05/2018
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780823279838
ISBN10: 0823279839
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Comparative Literature
- Social Science | Media Studies

About the Author
Susan Zieger is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature, and numerous articles in Victorian Studies, American Literature, PMLA, and other journals. Her research areas include nineteenth-century literature and culture, the history of medicine, historical media studies, and visual culture.