Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America's Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into UK education collection to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- Telegraphies explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures' telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, nation, and god. The book opens by discussing such Native American telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to challenge common notions that long-distance speech practices emerged only in conjunction with capitalist industrialization. Kay Yandell analyzes the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation Telegraphies integrates visions of Morse's electromagnetic telegraph, with its claim to speak new, coded words and to send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the miles. Such writers as Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Ella Cheever Thayer crafted memoirs, poetic odes, and novels that envision how the birth of instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, build community, and conceive of the divine. While some writers celebrated far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical Manifest Destiny to overspread America's primitive cultures, others revealed how telecommunication could empower previously silenced voices to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as bodies remained confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography. Ultimately, Telegraphies broadens the way literary scholars conceive of telecommunications technologies while providing a rich understanding of similarities between literatures often considered to have little in common.
- Copyright:
- 2018
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780190901066
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780190901059, 9780190901042
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 12/17/22
- Copyrighted By:
- Oxford University Press
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.