ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the first female newspaper stunt reporters in America in the nineteenth century: Nellie Bly. In 1889 she was sent on a transportation stunt to travel the world in less than eighty days (and thus to break the fictional record of the fictional character Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days). The periodical press did not only cover her journey (in both words and images). Joseph Pulitzer’s World, for instance, used various enticement strategies – such as games, prize contests, and puzzles – to attract readers to buy the next edition of the newspaper. In addition to this, Bly’s global circumvention was consumed in other ways. Among others, music sheet producers contributed to expanding the narrative imagination about Bly’s voyage, and toy manufacturers produced different consumer wares such as cards, board games, or paper dolls. This chapter sets out to analyze the characteristics of Bly’s travel narrative in the original carrier medium (the newspaper) and the historically conditioned dispersal of specific concepts, values, and ideas related to her journey across multiple platforms; it looks into the when, where, and how Bly ‘traveled’ the (journalistic) Anglophone media world of the nineteenth century.
