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Using Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship, this chapter examines newspaper editors’ efforts to cultivate an imagined community of readers. It illustrates the ways in which the editors taught, modeled, and regulated literacy via discussions of appropriate reading and writing practices. It also argues that advertisements for texts of all kinds debunk the idea of a textless Appalachia and discusses what the editors’ choices of advertisements suggest about how they imagined their audiences.

Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of experimentation, negotiation, hybridity, and historical dualities. Despite pressures to valorize the modern and thus separate literary eras at the century’s dividing mark, authors from the turn of the century, or the T-20 period, explore their historical legacies as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the new. Calling for a reading practice that encourages both forward and backward glancing, essays collected in this volume attest to the irreducibility of the century’s turn, which can be read as an era of historical complexity rather than as a period shaped by a decisive teleological march into new intellectual territory. Exploring the permeable boundaries and elastic categories of a literary history rich in multiple investments, essays here stress American literature’s navigation of moving boundaries that encompass not only temporal markers but intersecting literary and cultural traditions.

This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which those in the business of both early and pre-cinematic entertainment often combined literary and visual media in an endeavour to align the moving images on the screen with the moving images scrolling through the minds of their audiences. Echoing an enduring philosophical tradition of enlisting familiar optical devices to materialise the mechanisms of perception, memory, dreams, and associative streams of consciousness, these convergences between literary and popular visual media invited an analogical interplay between reading and viewing. This chapter considers the ways in which this inter-medial reciprocity aligns with a parallel history of the emergence of a modern psychology that was keen to understand and describe the dynamic processes that generate moving images in the mind, including reading, viewing and dreaming.

This chapter examines the dynamic media environment of Regency London through the lens of three very different convergences between literary and visual media. The first, Jane and Ann Taylor’s Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern emanates from a network of writers that channelled Lockean models of the mind into experimental visual and textual interactions. The second example, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington’s The Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1823) enlists the fluid dissolve of one lantern slide into the next to materialise the associative flow of reverie as she wanders through Regency London’s various attractions. The third example is Pierce Egan’s playful alignment of reading and looking through a camera obscura in The True History of Tom and Jerry; or The Day and Night Scenes, of Life in London (1821). Recalling reading Egan as a child, William Makepeace Thackeray described Life in London as an invitation to let his mind wander through the long-gone diversions of Regency London, this chapter reconsiders this response alongside Blessington’s Magic Lantern in the context of an emerging psychological preoccupation with the involuntary aspects of reading, viewing and the mind’s dynamic generation of moving images in states of reverie or dreaming.

This chapter examines Jeff Lemire's Trillium (2014) which, like many time travel narratives, reflects ideas of colonialism in the appropriation of territory and time by future scientist, Nika and British explorer Billy's respective cultures. The paper uses postcolonial theories of writers such as Frantz Fanon to draw parallels between colonial discourses of mapping and language in European voyages of discovery of the 16-20th centuries with that of the cultures of the British Empire and the future remnants of humanity.  In his comments on mapping, language and communication, Lemire shows how language and histories are tools of aggression against the Atabithians. Lemire, therefore, proposes alternate reading practices, histories and social orders by playing with the comic form, language and spatiality. In doing so he destabilizes readers’ commonsense perceptions of realism, time and history.

This chapter examines the assumptions about the training of the popular imagination that underlie Dickens’s famous account of ‘The Amusements of the People’ in the context of one of the most iconic popular amusements of the mid-Victorian period, Dr Pepper’s Ghost. Pepper’s spectre was advertised as an inspired adaptation of an idea taken from one of Dickens’s The Haunted Man; or the Ghost’s Bargain (1848), on a handbill that made no distinction between mechanical and imaginative attractions. This chapter argues that despite Dickens’s efforts to distinguish the potentially transformative humanising power of popular theatre from the mechanical attractions of the Polytechnics, the assumed automatism that underlies his concept of the imagination as a form of involuntary response was echoed in Pepper’s rationale for introducing imaginative content into the Royal Polytechnic programme when he took over management in the early 1850s.Inspired by the natural magical tradition of David Brewster, Pepper, like Dickens, was committed to defining the habits of his audience; a mutual commitment which positions the literary and technological enterprises of both men within an established philosophical and psychological debate on habit.

This chapter reads the popular nineteenth-century mediation of Byron’s work in a range of panoramic formats as a multi-medial extension of already established practices of visual and linguistic mediation. Byron is transformed by this circulatory network into a fungible medium, a flickering figure that moves in and out of focus, guiding the reader to attend to a series of familiar privileged scenes, events and spaces, while holding out the prospect of intimate access, of speaking the same language as the poet. This chapter begins with the circulation of extracts from Byron’s poems in early panoramic guides and reviews of various Leicester Square Panorama and concludes with the spectacular use of panoramic technologies in mid-nineteenth century adaptations of one of Byron’s many controversial historical fictions, Sardanapalus.

The Introduction to the book sets Danielewski’s first three major works in their historical and cultural context, discussing the form of each and the way that each makes use of technological advances to showcase the potential of the printed book. The literary context of his work is also established, as connections with and allusions to both contemporary writers (Eggers, Foster Wallace) and important experimental forebears (Pynchon, Joyce) are signalled. The forthcoming chapters of the book are summarised and outlined, along with key critical approaches to Danielewski’s novels. The Introduction ends by considering the complex kinds of readerly engagement that his work encourages, highlighting the fact that the role of the reader will be a key focus of many of the subsequent chapters.