Picturing The Postcard A New Media Crisis At The Turn Of The Century Monica Cure by Monica Cure 9781517902797, 1517902797 instant download after payment.

Literature has “died” many times—this book tells the story of its death by postcard. Picturing the Postcard looks to this unlikely source to shed light on our collective, modern-day obsession with new media. The postcard, almost unimaginably now, produced at the end of the nineteenth century the same anxieties & hopes that many people think are unique to twenty-first-century social media such as Facebook or Twitter. It promised a newly connected social world accessible to all & threatened the breakdown of authentic social relations & even of language. 

Arguing that “new media” is as much a discursive object as a material one, & that it is always in dialogue with the media that came before it, Monica Cure reconstructs the postcard’s history through journals, legal documents, & sources from popular culture, analyzing the postcard’s representation in fiction by well-known writers such as E. M. Forster & Edith Wharton & by more obscure writers like Anne Sedgwick & Herbert Flowerdew. 

Writers deployed uproar over the new medium of the postcard by Anglo-American cultural critics to mirror anxieties about the changing nature of the literary marketplace, which included the new role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity and the loss of privacy, an increasing dependence on new technologies, & the rise of mass media. Literature kept open the postcard’s possibilities & in the process reimagined what literature could be.

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Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, & dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry & translations have been published in journals internationally. Her translation of The Censor's Notebook was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.