Alberto Gabriele is the author of Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism and the forthcoming Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective. He is working on a project on the global circulation of print culture in the 1860s and has been, most recently, a Macgeorge fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Presents print culture and the literary imagination as an unacknowledged pre-cinematic optical toy

Offers a comprehensive and expansive discussion that stretches from Dante to William Wordsworth

Proposes a new understanding of the relationship between literature and modernity.

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Emergence of Precinema.- Chapter 2 From Analogia Entis to the Threshold of Self-Reflexivity in the Poetry of Dante, Donne and Shakespeare.- Chapter 3 The Modern(ist) Reader: Friedrich Schlegel's Fragments, the Emergence of Modern Philology and the Montage Effect of Industrial Modernity.- Chapter 4 A Map to the Panorama: the Self-reflexive Construction of Sight and the Flickering Shadows of the Phantasmagoria Effect in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho.- Chapter 5 Visions of the City of London: Mechanical Eye and Poetic Transcendence in Wordsworth's Prelude-Book 7.- Notes.- Bibliography.