1pm, IASH, 2 Hope Park Square
Professor Angela Esterhammer: The Late-Romantic Information Age, 1820-1830: Speculation, Improvisation, Identity.
Abstract:
This book project takes a new look at the literary-cultural field of the 1820s – an era traditionally neglected by literary history, but one that saw breathtaking innovations in the spread of information. Focusing on metropolitan centres such as London, Edinburgh, and Paris, The Late-Romantic Information Age analyses changes that were taking place in media of communication, social and class relationships, public opinion, habits of reading and viewing, and genres of writing and performance. I describe the “episteme” of the 1820s using interrelated concepts and motifs that proliferated in the decade’s best-selling literature, periodicals, popular theatre, and non-fictional discourses such as political economy.
The concepts of speculation and improvisation were especially prominent during this era, in frames of reference ranging from the aesthetic to the economic. Both terms suggest hasty, risky action that adopts hypothetical premises, responds to contingencies, and orients itself toward open-ended future possibilities. Literature of the 1820s thematises these conditions, often relating improvisational action and speculative behaviour more specifically to the construction of personal and social identities. By emphasizing the improvisational and speculative nature of writing, acting, and publishing together with writers’ self-conscious experimentation with media, I propose a new paradigm for understanding the 1820s as an “age of information” as well as a self-reflective “age-in-formation.”