Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839-1893

In Immersive Words, Michelle Jarenski demonstrates that the contemporary challenge that visual images and virtual environments in cinema and photography, on the web, and in video games pose to reading and writing are not uniquely contemporary developments but equally exercised the imaginations, anxieties, and works of nineteenth-century authors.

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of numerous visual technologies and techniques: the daguerreotype, immersive exhibiti...