Automatically Popular: Exoticism and Mass Media in Nineteenth-century British Fiction Shepherd, Bethany Snow creator 2011 vi, 225 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011) McLaughlin, Kevin Director Keach, William Reader Ryan, Vanessa Reader Brown University. English sponsor theses 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. British fiction Exoticism mass culture popular nineteenth-century culture Popular culture RPB 20111003 engEnglish10.7301/Z0T43RBMIn CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations