From Paper to Pixel

Abstract

The introduction lays out the book’s terms, critical concerns, method, and historical and theoretical contexts. Explaining how printed ephemera transformed the texture of everyday middle- and working-class life throughout the nineteenth century, peaking in the 1860s and 1890s, it then shows how affect, itself an ephemeral human condition, registered the new social relations that mass media reorganized. The introduction explains the book’s engagement with theorists of media and mass media such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer, and Friedrich Kittler; and theorists of affect and mass culture such as Eve Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, and Kathleen Stewart. It describes the cultural evidence the book assembles, such as temperance medals, cigarette cards, ink blot games, and novels; and describes each chapter.