Abstract Order and Fleeting Sensations: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia

Abstract

Scholarly work on the history of the practices of reading have stressed the importance, when discussing the reception of the periodical press, of the intertextual experience constituted by reading a periodical.¹ Rather than defining this experience as intertextual, a term that carries the implication that all materials, as texts, are communication acts, I choose to define this experience as dialectical, in order to take into consideration the specifics of each medium and the complex production of meaning that reading the periodical press through the process of montage entails. The “dialectics of the everyday” that the periodical press exemplifies presents a wide array of stimuli—visual and textual—that are encoded in specific media and genres. Each medium appears to the reader as a separate kind of communication that follows different conventions. The separate components of the magazine, therefore, require different forms of attention on the reader’s part. A glance at an advertisement does not require the same attention as a scientific article. The lingering emotions elicited by one installment of a sensation novel, moreover, accompany the reader while the more reassuring voice of, for instance, a newspaper article defuses its emotional impact. The dialogical relation between the heterogeneous components of the magazine entails the constant negotiation of the reader’s emotions and thoughts.

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception

—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility