Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century

by Monica Cure

The first full-length study of a once revolutionary visual and linguistic medium 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 and 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 and threatened the breakdown of authentic social relations and even of language. 

Arguing that “new media” is as much a discursive object as a material one, and that it is always in dialogue with the media that came before it, Monica Cure reconstructs the postcard’s history through journals, legal documents, and sources from popular culture, analyzing the postcard’s representation in fiction by well-known writers such as E. M. Forster and Edith Wharton and by more obscure writers like Anne Sedgwick and 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, and the rise of mass media. Literature kept open the postcard’s possibilities and in the process reimagined what literature could be. 

Genres: History

262 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 18, 2018

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

What started out as a doctoral dissertation turned into this fascinating book! It’s a good reminder that every generation has it’s “new media” that starts out as disruptive and eventually finds a place in our lives. As electronic media has served to distance us from each other and bring us together at the same time, this book about the lowly postcard reminds us of an old tool we can make new again.

[Robert McTague · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book does many things competently, and a couple of things exceedingly well. First, it provides historically-accurate depth of understanding about something we all know of, but typically don't know a lot about. Secondly, it truly hits home--as early as the book's introduction--that much of what we're seeing in the Age of Social Media...we've seen before. The medium and specifics have changed but the basic aspects of the phenomenon have not. And so, as with all good analyses (and it definitely is), it offers cogent explanations, serious but non-alarmist warnings, and reassurances of what we are/can be--all at the same time. A must-read for anyone who follows history, communications (including strategic), media studies, social discourse both micro- and macro-, and any aspects of culture.