This book shows that to live in the modern world is to live in a culture of sensation. 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 sensation 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. Film, in turn, can be said to embody sensation in its very mode of operation. And all this has proved intensely controversial. Does the sensationalism of modern experience distort our capacity for understanding events and for rational and responsible reaction to them? When disasters can look indistinguishable from scenes in disaster movies, can we tell truth from fiction, and is the impact of the former diminished?This book explores the centrality of sensation to modernity and explores its contemporary implications, drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze to develop a distinctive cultural framework. The book is illustrated with examples from literature, film, art and other cultural resources.