123421 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2019W)

The nineteenth century has been seen as marking the birth of the mass media. Numerous technological developments (e.g. transportation, new printing technologies, photography, cinema, telephone, etc.) and socio-cultural changes (e.g. access to education, transcontinental travel, etc.) also contributed to the creation of thriving press, literary, and visual cultures. Unlike earlier studies, the most recent research also sees the nineteenth century as giving birth to transmedia storytelling as we know it today. Indeed, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, but also the suffragettes, popularisers of Victorian science along with the propagators of e.g. Sherlock Holmes made clever use of what we would today call transmedia practices. Of course, specific nineteenth-century transmedia practices differed greatly from today's phenomena (e.g. Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Sherlock franchises).

That is why, this seminar will be devoted to tracing the specificity of transmedia practices in the nineteenth century: What did they consist of? Who was involved? How did they differ from contemporary transmedia phenomena? Here, we will inspect certain aspects of these exciting developments. We will engage in archival research in order to look at the production, circulation, and reception of Victorian stories, characters, and knowledge. In this context, we will discuss such issues as authorship, serialization and adaptation as well as readership along with Victorian popular imagination and activism.

If you are interested in the Victorian era, love reading, and enjoy research, this certainly is a seminar for you!