This dissertation argues that many instances of nineteenth-century British fiction rely on exoticism to narrate the collective experience of mass media as an unfamiliar dynamic between producers, consumers, and mechanical reproducibility. Opium consumption and other exotic motifs in works by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Wilkie Collins show how literary expressions of emerging mass media influence cultural reproduction as a whole. By exploring the way exoticism in fiction is related to mass media, this project supplements a large body of work that assumes the primary role of exotic themes is to support or critique British imperialism. Exoticism's popularity with readers makes the relationship between fiction and automated reproducibility visible, and while doing so, composes and discomposes cultural distinctions between realism and romance, organic and mechanic form, genre and media, author and reader.
Shepherd, Bethany Snow,
"Automatically Popular: Exoticism and Mass Media in Nineteenth-century British Fiction"
(2011).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0T43RBM
