Telegraphic Realism

Menke, Richard. "Telegraphic Realism: Henry James's In the Cage. PMLA 115.5 (2000): 975-90. Also Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. Stanford, CA (since 2012/13 Redwood City): Stanford UP, 2007.

On-line book blurb: Menke's Telegraphic Realism is the first comprehensive reading of Victorian fiction as part of an emerging world of new media technologies and information exchange. The book analyzes the connections between fictional writing, communication technologies, and developing ideas about information, from the postage stamp and electric telegraph to wireless. By placing fiction in dialogue with media history, it argues that Victorian realism was print culture's sophisticated response to the possibilities and dilemmas of a world of media innovations and information flows.

J. H. Chung, Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity, notes that Menke "explores the merging of boundaries between machines and art" in his PMLA article, showing "telegraph operators as writing machines" (p. 32 n. 16).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 15Jan20