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In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows.
Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency.
Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age’s baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media’s weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.
Media Critique in the Age of Gillray reflects on print and paper culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, crafting a new approach to British visual culture.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: December 2021
- Pages: 316
Joseph Monteyne is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.
"Monteyne’s book is scholarly, wide ranging, insightful, theoretically informed, and dense; it demands to be read patiently. The book is also well produced and lavishly illustrated with color images throughout."
J. T. Lynch, Rutgers University–Newark
CHOICE
“Media Critique in the Age of Gillray provides a semiotic journey through the baseless fabric of late-eighteenth-century print culture and is worth reading, and then reading again since it provides abundant opportunities for making connections.”
Amanda Lahikainen, Ogunquit Museum of American Art
The Art Bulletin
"Filled with ingenious insights and surprising juxtapositions, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray provides a masterful tour through the thoroughfares and back alleys of British art in the late eighteenth century. Cerebral in its meditations, the book never forgets the materials, labour, bodies, and politics that made, circulated, and imagined Romantic-era print in highly self-conscious ways."
Matthew C. Hunter, Associate Professor of Art History, McGill University
"This book is a remarkable and timely advance in state-of-the-art research, full of acute insights and carefully constructed arguments. It will find a broad readership given its groundbreaking historical and critical contributions to the history of communications, print culture, visual studies, and media theory that productively frame our current cultural moment, dominated as it is by exchanges via dematerialized social media."
Lisa Pon, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California
"In Media Critique in the Age of Gillray, Joseph Monteyne invites us to take a new look at the cultural politics of the printed image. Through a series of dazzling and detailed interpretations of prints which reveal elements of their own making and materiality – black squares, smeared and scratched portraits, spectral presences, mirrorings, and scavenged pictures – he convincingly demonstrates how visual culture was troubled by the crises of representation attendant on a burgeoning mass media and new forms of money in the ‘age of paper.’"
Miles Ogborn, Professor of Geography, Queen Mary University of London
"Media Critique in the Age of Gillray is a dazzling contribution to our understanding of British print culture, offering a compelling analysis of the enchantments, doublings, and spectral returns of the so-called ‘paper age.’ Traversing several disciplines with nuance and erudition and attentive always to the materiality of individual works, Monteyne shows how printed images were the site of the body’s most profound erasure as well as its most dramatic reappearances."
Richard Taws, Reader in History of Art, University College London