Why do we say, with so much certainty and so much anxiety, that we live in a mediated age? The most common answer to this question is that the rapid dispersion of new technologies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries intensified our media-saturated experience. My dissertation, Media Vita: Race, Romanticism, and the History of Mediation, 1785-1885, challenges this explanation and argues instead that our tendency to confuse mediation with technology obscures a far richer and more bewildering history of “media vita”—or what ex-Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson calls “mediatorial life”—which treats mediation as a question of shared existence. For philosophers after Immanuel Kant, mediation refers to a modern vision of relationality that imagines existence in and through another—constituted, for example, through the labor of another body, the sensuous materials of the earth, or the instrumentality of an object. Far from an exclusively philosophical concern, this new mode of conceptualizing existence shaped social, economic, and literary thought from the late Enlightenment to the earliest advent of communication studies at the end of the nineteenth century. Offering a new prehistory of media studies through American Romantic literature, Media Vita uncovers the historical discourse of mediation as it shaped not only nineteenth-century ways of knowing but also the way we experience our mediated age today.