Introduction: Sensationalism and the genealogy of modernity: Transnational currents, intermedial trajectories-a global nineteenth-century

Abstract

Mapping the temporal and geographic coordinates of the trope of sensationalism in the long, global nineteenth century helps to reorient the temporal coordinates of the history of industrial modernity and to identify a transhistorical and transnational continuum in its manifestations. Such a continuum closely links modernist experimentations with the highlighting of materiality and the engagement with fragmentation and disruptive sensations in the course of the long nineteenth century, from the experience of urban space to the performance of the dislocation of spatiotemporal coordinates in popular culture. While the “Global Nineteenth Century” approach of the subtitle dispenses with an impossible encyclopedic thoroughness, it nonetheless aims to recognize the unavoidable necessity to incorporate such a global perspective in contemporary research.