Bloomsbury Academic Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (The WISH List)

Under what conditions does sensation become sensational? By the early nineteenth century murder had become the staple of the sensationalizing popular press, and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the sensations of the reader. Later, concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was being articulated in the language of sensation, and media sensationalism was already being seen both as contributing to this process and as magnifying its impact, just as sensation was, in turn, taken up by literature, art and film. Finally, it seems as though the dramatization of these experiences in an era of media panics over terrorism, paedophilia, etc, has taken an overtly melodramatic form, in which battles of good and evil play out across the landscapes of our lives. Sensational Subjectsdevelops an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to exploring these themes, their impact and their implications for understanding the modern world. Review "By inviting us to think about modern experience as both sensation and sensational John Jervis has written a book of wide-ranging importance. Sensational Subjects is a scintillating read." --Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, UK"Sensational Subjects is a remarkable theoretical achievement for its analyses of the fertile interrelationships between aesthetics and a politics of modernity rich in latent possibilities and animated by our senses in every sense of this term." --Morton Schoolman, Professor of Political Science, SUNY Albany, USA About the Author John Jervis is Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He is the author of Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (1998) and Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness (2000) and the co-editor of Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (2008).