Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (review)

Reviewed by: Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger Richard Menke (bio) Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, eds., Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. xiv + 193, $160/£120 cloth, $48.95/£36.99 e-book. Two decades ago, the communications scholar Henry Jenkins coined the phrase "transmedia storytelling" to describe the use of multiple media channels to create an expansive fictional world. Taking advantage of the affordances and social orientations of multiple media, transmedia storytelling could encourage not just increased media consumption but also audience involvement, immersion, and creativity. The ascendance of electronic media such as websites and videogames in the 1990s made the concept timely, but Jenkins and others noted that the phenomenon was far older than contemporary transmedia franchises such as Star Trek or Pokémon. Studies such as Matthew Freeman's Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (2017) and Ruth Mayer's Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (2014) have helped to analyse the significance of transmediality in the early twentieth century. Now the essays in Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century help us understand the dynamics of transmedia in an earlier era. In truth, the collection's long nineteenth century is not especially long; most of its essays cluster around the period from 1870 to 1920, which helps unite its contents despite the different topics and approaches represented here. This era, of course, saw a dramatic expansion in the number, circulation, and diversity of periodicals in the United Kingdom and North America. As Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger argue in their incisive introductory chapter, the multiplicity of these competing, open-ended, serial print platforms, as well as their innovations in printing, distribution, and reader engagement, drove transmedia practices in the era. The lack of strong copyright laws or clear rules for licensing what jurists were beginning to call intellectual property was another important element. The case studies here suggest that these factors made the era's transmedia practices significantly more improvisational than today's cross-platform campaigns, except perhaps when it came to particularly perceptive or dogged media producers late in the period. Indeed, many of the examples here do not closely fit the outlines of present-day transmedia storytelling, which allows the volume's contributors to explore the practical and theoretical boundaries of transmediality itself. Eckart Voigts "stretches [the] limits" of the concept by viewing the real-world extensions of Walter Besant's condition-of-England novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), which inspired the creation of civic [End Page 315] buildings such as the East London "People's Palace" (1887), and George Chesney's invasion-of-England novella The Battle of Dorking (1871), which Voigts sees contributing to future generations of war fiction as well as a wider "literary-military complex" that bewailed the vulnerability of the homeland and called for a strengthened military (27, 40). Martin Lüthe examines how Mark Twain's "A Telephonic Conversation" (1880) and early twentieth-century advertising by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company position the new medium of the telephone by focusing on its relationships to other media—an analysis of what is more typically called intermediality. Heidi Lucja Liedke demonstrates that live telephonic broadcasts of nineteenth-century theatre foregrounded the means of transmission and listenership over the particular pieces being transmitted, something of an inversion of transmedia studies' usual focus on content across media. To examine the transmedial dimensions of the city mystery novel, Lisanne Wiele considers George Lippard's The Quaker City (which began its serial run in 1844), although her main interests lie in the transnational aspects of genre diffusion and in Lippard's representations of race. And Anne-Julia Zwierlein analyses the public lecture as a transmedial place of gendered gatekeeping that could nevertheless offer a space for feminist activism. Several examples of turn-of-the-century transmedia anticipate modern practices more closely while leaving ample room for critical insights into their media and meanings. Ian Gordon shows how the shrewd American cartoonist Rose O'Neill moved her Kewpie characters across magazines...

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