scholarly journals Tacking: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and its Readers

Author(s):  
Laurel Brake

Abstract This article begins with an analysis of how nineteenth-century print journalism was produced to become a basic constituent of the public sphere of its day, and how it tackled the problems of survival beyond its date of issue. I then turn to the current flurry of remediation of the nineteenth-century press in the last five years and how digitisation of print now addresses similar tasks of optimising readership, distribution, and durability. This involves consideration of one of the current central questions, the roles of public and private platforms of delivery and their relation to access. In conclusion, I explore the impact of the digitisation of nineteenth-century journalism, and digitisation more generally, on Victorian studies and its publics. I focus on two aspects of impact: how meaning in literature and history is invigorated by digital access to their representation in historical and material context, and how the proliferation of illustration in new digital media, enabled by freedom from the limitations attached to print formats, addresses twenty-first century visually-literate readers directly, helping the transmission of Victorian Studies to the imagination of contemporary readers, across social class and internationally.

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 106-128
Author(s):  
Ruth Hemstad

“The campaign with ink instead of blood”: Manuscripts, print and the war of opinion in the Scandinavian public sphere, 1801–1814Handwritten pamphlets circulated to a high extend as part of the war of opinion which went on in the Norwegian-Swedish borderland around 1814. This ‘campaign with ink instead of blood’, as Danish writers soon characterized this detested activity, was a vital part of the Swedish policy of conquering Norway from Denmark through the means of propaganda. This ‘secret war of opinion’, as it was described in 1803, culminated around 1814, when Sweden accomplished its long-term goal of forming a union with Norway. In this article I am concerned with the role and scope of handwritten letters, actively distributed as pamphlets as part of the Swedish monitoring activities in the borderland, especially in the period 1812 to 1813. These manuscripts were integrated parts of the manifold of publications circulating within a common, although conflict oriented Scandinavian public sphere in the making at this time. The duplication and distribution of handwritten pamphlets, and the interaction with printed material, as Danish counter pamphlets quoting and discussing these manuscripts, illustrates that manuscripts remained important at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They coexisted and interacted with printed material of different kinds, and have to be taken into consideration when studying the public sphere and the print culture in this period.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-379
Author(s):  
JAMES P. WOODARD

AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaper O Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documents O Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests that O Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.


Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst

This chapter traces the evolution U.S. news, from the American realism of the nineteenth century to the advent of online media in the twenty-first century. It discusses how the spider of digital media sent images on paper into retreat, leaving printing and paper manufacturing industries in disarray. It details how newspaper stories grew in length from the 1880s to the 2010s. These longer stories reflected changes in content and visual presentation, which changed how news presented people, events, and places. The impact of longer news on content was also counterintuitive. Instead of “human interest” growing, ordinary and working-class people disappeared from news, replaced by groups, officials, and experts. Although audiences presumably preferred local stories, locations moved away from the street address, as references to faraway places expanded. Moreover, news no longer aimed to report events-as-they-happened for the public to process. It explained larger problems or tried to make sense of issues, aiming to interpret events.


PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Adriana Craciun

Mary robinson's essay “present state of the manners, society, etc. etc. of the metropolis of England,” published in the reformist Monthly Magazine shortly before the author's death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatility of British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once again recognized as a major writer of the Romantic period, Robinson influenced and was influenced by contemporaries such as Southey, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, who called Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius” (Letter). “Metropolis” is an important document not only because of its engagement with the contemporary debate over the direction of print culture and the public sphere but also because of the alternative it offers to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Moreover, it provides an important link between earlier eighteenth-century concepts of urban culture and cosmopolitan refinement and later nineteenth-century ideas of urban identity such as Poe's Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire's flâneur. Resolutely urban, democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson's essay amounts to a manifesto of metropolitan culture.


Author(s):  
Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima ◽  
Caio Gonçalves Dias

Abstract In this article we argue that, in order to understand the “attack” made on anthropology in Brazil, undertaken in the public sphere since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we need to look at how anthropological knowledge has become disciplined and institutionalized in the medium to long term. We refer, in particular, to the relationship between what has been constituted as a “field of anthropology” and issues related to the public sphere. It is also necessary to consider the configuration with other institutionalized knowledge throughout the period spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, with discontinuities but also with some important continuities. We look to show that the anthropology initially undertaken in Brazil was basically committed to furthering the interests of the agrarian-based political elites, a situation that continued from the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first, not only at the level of nation building, but also in the formation of the State. However, since the 1950s, and especially following creation of the new postgraduate courses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, anthropologists developed knowledge that led them to make an ethical and moral commitment to the communities with which they worked, combined with a critique of the military regime’s developmentalism and dictatorial authoritarianism. During a third moment ranging from the constituent process to the present, a portion of Brazilian anthropologists began to work directly in the recognition of rights constitutionally assigned to differentiated collectivities, generating a growing and progressive zone of friction with the hegemonic sectors at the economic-political level.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-87
Author(s):  
Nguyễn Tuấn Cường ◽  
Phạm Văn Tuấn ◽  
Nguyễn Văn Thanh

This essay is a study of the woodblock print culture at Khê Hồi temple in Thường Tín district, Hà Tây province (belonging to present day Hà Nội), a temple that is located in the same area as two other temples addressed in this volume (Thắng Nghiêm temple and Phổ Nhân temple). After describing the temple’s history and the various Buddhist schools that have influenced Khê Hồi temple, this essay proceeds to describe and analyze the temple’s extant woodblock collection (over 700 plates, and many books), which was discovered in 2001. The essay goes on to examine the circulation of books printed from the temple’s woodblock collection by means of: (1) comparing the temple’s woodblocks with Buddhist texts in the collection of the Institute of Sino-Nôm Studies and (2) examining neighboring temples to determine whether or not they have preserved books printed from Khê Hồi temple’s woodblocks. Through analyzing the history of woodblocks and their circulation pertaining to Khê Hồi temple in the context of nineteenth-century Buddhist woodblocks and texts in Northern Vietnam, this essay argues that Buddhism played a preponderant role in the creation and dissemination of printed texts in nineteenth-century Vietnam. During this period, although Buddhist print culture was already quite developed, the circulation of printed texts was largely limited to temples, and had not yet become widespread in secular society or the “public sphere” at large. This would later change during the “Buddhist Revival” of 1920–1945, when printing and print culture had already taken on their modern form.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Tanya Agathocleous

This introductory chapter introduces James Long, an Anglo-Irish missionary who was active in schoolbook production and fascinated by Bengali literature, who published A Catalogue of Bengali Newspapers and Periodicals from 1818 to 1855. As the author of this text, he was in a good position to argue, two years later, that had the British paid more heed to the discontent on view in Indian periodicals, they might have prevented the 1857 Rebellion. With such argument, the chapter unveils the impact of the 1857 Rebellion into the Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, an official acknowledgment of the power of the Indian press, and how it metastasized into a full-fledged culture of surveillance. It investigates how politics and affect became “officially” (legally) coupled at a crucial historical juncture, and the wide-ranging effects of this coupling on politics, literary culture, and ideas of criticism. The chapter also focuses on what British administrators thought Indian affect was, how they sought to control it and the effects this had on print culture and the colonial public sphere. For this reason, the chapter uses the words “affect” and “emotion” interchangeably, reflecting the way they were used in colonial courtrooms, as prosecutors sought to find evidence and proof of disaffection. Ultimately, it analyses the way censorship influenced conceptions of the public sphere and of the politics of empire.


Author(s):  
Mykola Prokhorov

The article deals with important aspects of the impact of new technologies on mediasphere in Poland in terms of adaptation of modern European experience. Underlined European influence on Poland implementation media projects in the public sphere and in the sphere of business and within local government. Also highlights the fact that for modern mediasphere of Poland, there is only one way - is to follow the European model of media openness and transparency, setting them to play effective and independent civil government positions. In the new environment of electronic media they become sometimes quite unexpected dimensions and social emphasis. Also emphasized that at the beginning of XXI century the Internet has become an important source of daily information to citizens and often replaces traditional news media - radio and TV. Because it focuses on promoting digital media projects to maintain effective management and proper civic activity. Keywords: Newmedia, civilsociety, theinformationsociety, e-government, Poland


Antiquity ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (344) ◽  
pp. 472-477
Author(s):  
Lucy Shipley

In the autumn of 2013, a discovery was made in the Doganaccia necropolis close to the ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinia. A sepulchre was uncovered, mercifully and unusually unlooted. Inside were the remains of two individuals and a range of grave goods, allowing the tomb to be typologically dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BC. One of the individuals had been cremated, while the other was laid out in a supine position. Both were placed on funeral benches similar to those known from Etruscan tombs across the region (Steingräber 2009). This excavation was as unusual as it was spectacular—the equally vigorous efforts of nineteenth-century enthusiasts (Leighton 2004: 12) and twentieth-century tomb robbers (van Velzen 1999: 180) have left little of the Etruscan burial record undisturbed. Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of media excitement over the burial, as its excavator, distinguished Etruscan scholar Alessandro Mandolesi, spoke with the press of his impressions of the remains and their relationship to the artefacts found in the tomb. Little of his exact words remain in the public sphere, but the impression he provided to the press was clear in the flurry of media reports that followed his statement. The ensuing media interest and archaeological developments present a number of serious issues for the practice of archaeology in an age in which digital media can magnify the impact of any major discovery. In addition, the interpretation put forward exposed the continued androcentrism inherent in many sub-disciplines of archaeology, which, 30 years on from Conkey and Spector's (1984) transformative publication, remain locked in deeply problematic interpretative patterns. This interpretation of the Tarquinia burial is emblematic of a far wider phenomenon, both within and beyond Italy, which has serious implications for future archaeological practice. This article unpicks both the media storm and interpretative paradigms that characterised this case study, and queries archaeological responsibility and visibility in an age of 24-hour news.


Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.


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