Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News

What are the relations among the new media of the turn of the twentieth century, modernist form, and the epistemological tensions and crises connected to western modernity? We know about Joyce's headlines, Dos Passos's "news reels." Critics dating back to Marshall McLuhan have taken up analogies between the fragmented jigsaw newspaper page and the disjunctions of modernist form, and a substantial body of criticism links the development of montage in early narrative cinema with parallel aesthetics in painting, poetry, and prose.¹ But what if the Anglo-American aesthetics of parataxis and the fragment can be traced back further, to the latter stages of Victorian New Journalism—and thereby linked also with the cultural tensions and aporias brought on by empire? Such an analysis would further articulate the links between modernism, imperialism, and cinema aesthetics skimmed in Frederic Jameson's landmark "Modernism and Imperialism."² Further, establishing a causal link between imperial expansion, newspaper aesthetics, and modernist form in various media would suggest deep and substantive connections between two currently separate and non-communicative—not to say hostile—enterprises in contemporary modernist criticism: on one hand work that focuses on global modernisms, transnational exchange, and modernism's imbrication with empire, on the other work that focuses on modernism's complex relations with "media in an age of mass persuasion."³ Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz have, in drawing attention to these dual trends in the field, suggested that the "transnational turn" is more central and more likely to inform the field for years to come, while work centered on "mass media rhetorics...may turn out to be not the leading edge of a major trend but only a momentary convergence."⁴ In what follows I want to pursue a third way that links these two parallel tracks in modernist studies, seeking connections between print culture and new media rhetorics and imperial expansion, increasing globalism, and transnational exchange. Specifically, I want to give the burgeoning subfield of modernist periodical studies an imperial turn, and thus show how its resources might inform the study of modernism's relations, critical and complicit, with empire. And I want to do so by hazarding the theory that modern anxiety and proto-modernist aesthetics appear in a new form in London's illustrated newspapers of the latter decades of the nineteenth century, where disorienting expansions of the city, its print culture, and the empire meet and are brought to a new, provisional kind of aesthetic order in the print artifact of the Illustrated London News. While doing so will require that I discuss the visual and verbal rhetoric of empire, my emphasis lies not on the (now familiar) ways in which England posited itself as the center of the world and its imperial holdings as peripheries dependent upon it. Rather, I focus on how the larger rhetorical problem of representing increasingly vast and heterogeneous spaces exerted formal pressure on the popular artifact of the illustrated weekly newspaper, producing new uses and configurations of page space that were 1) analogous to imperial understandings of geopolitical space and 2) proto-modernist in formal terms. I believe that scholarship that works between the three topoi of modernist form, imperial expansion and crisis, and materialist print culture offers a fruitful nexus for further study. While individual scholars and projects will array these themes differently, I foreground questions of space in periodicals, probing the implied analogies between newspaper-page space and the "real-world" spaces newspapers represent; and I argue that complications in the perceived world "out there"—complications partially caused by imperial expansion and substantially understood by urban British subjects through imperial rhetoric—produced new aesthetic forms in illustrated newspapers, forms that anticipated the later aesthetic responses of high modernism.

Periodicals, meaning, and space

The Illustrated London News was the first "respectable" illustrated weekly in England, seeking a place in middle-class parlors by eschewing the garish crime coverage of the mid-Victorian Sunday papers. The paper sold for sixpence in the 1890s and sought an audience, in Peter Sinnema's words, "decidedly middle-class and middle-brow."⁵ This middle-class orientation...