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The Material and Cultural Foundations of American Magazines

Heather A. Haveman

in Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741-1860

This chapter examines the material and cultural foundations that provided the resources necessary for magazine publishing and the demand necessary to sustain a large number of magazines in locations ... More

This chapter examines the material and cultural foundations that provided the resources necessary for magazine publishing and the demand necessary to sustain a large number of magazines in locations across America. In particular, it explores a number of fundamental changes in American society that supported the explosive growth and increasing variety of magazines. It first considers basic material supports such as advances in printing and papermaking technologies and the development of the U.S. postal system before discussing the more complex demographic, economic, and cultural supports. These include population growth and urbanization and the rise of various religious, political, and economic communities of readers. In particular, the chapter describes the growth of an increasingly urban, better-educated, more prosperous population, along with the development of copyright law in Britain and America and its impact on cultural conceptions of authorship in both countries.Less

Working with Maps

Kory Olson

in The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris

In order to understand fully the proposed communication circuit between map maker and map reader, one may turn to a variety of tools, such as semiotics, the framework for my map image analysis. The ... More

In order to understand fully the proposed communication circuit between map maker and map reader, one may turn to a variety of tools, such as semiotics, the framework for my map image analysis. The investigation of colour, shapes, symbols, and text on maps of Third-Republic Paris help uncover underlying themes of modernity, stability, ease of movement, and growth. There are also benefits to be gained from working with maps. The visual nature of the medium has the potential to draw a reader’s eye much more effectively than pages and pages of black and white script. Beyond discourse, this chapter also investigates the changing role of the French state in the history of cartography. With a population that could more readily access and understand maps as the Third Republic progressed, cartography helped foster the growing field of French urbanism and planning. Furthermore, the government shifted from presenting what it had accomplished in Paris throughout the Third Republic to planning and managing its growth and state cartography needed to adapt. An investigation of historic cartographic colour printing techniques will show how this is done and support this book’s map analysis.Less

What Digital Remediation Does to Critical Editions and Reading Practices

Terje Hillesund and Claire Bélisle

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter analyzes critical edition digitization ambitions, ranging from the conception and aims of editors to the expectations of readers. The first part deals with issues and questions raised by ... More

This chapter analyzes critical edition digitization ambitions, ranging from the conception and aims of editors to the expectations of readers. The first part deals with issues and questions raised by the digital trend in scholarly text editions as they migrate from one media to another. The chapter explains, through the concept of remediation, how the traits and configuration of editions that are present in print technology live on in digital technology, even though text creation and dissemination have profoundly changed. Digital remediation of text is taking place within a digital context impelling new reading habits. The remainder of the chapter explores these new emerging reading practices, coupled with a probing of readers' expectations.Less

“The Darlynge of Futuritie”: Thomas Chatterton and the Technologies of Juvenile Prolepsis

Laurie Langbauer

in The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750–1835

Thomas Chatterton provided a model for juvenile writers who self-consciously followed him in creating and sustaining juvenile literary culture. The publication of his literary remains by Southey and ... More

Thomas Chatterton provided a model for juvenile writers who self-consciously followed him in creating and sustaining juvenile literary culture. The publication of his literary remains by Southey and Cottle turn attention to precocious genius into an understanding of literary tradition. Innovations in publishing in the latter part of the eighteenth century made print technology the medium of the emergence of the modern. Understanding Chatterton as exemplary premature writer, a kind of boy wonder, the assumed origin of the juvenile tradition itself, recasts his faux archaic writing into the proleptic emblem of an ultramodern future. Chatterton’s forgery of a literary past, by cannily manipulating new technologies of literary production, mocks conventional models of history as slow development. His celebrity a rallying point for later young writers, Chatterton’s imposture models the proleptic stance adopted by later juveniles, a rhetorical position allowing the writing of history in advance of the event.Less

Scientific, Medical, and Technical Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: New Formats for New Readers

Gowan Dawson and Jonathan R. Topham

in Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities

Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a sizable expansion in the number and variety of science and medicine periodicals, making it difficult terrain for a twenty-first-century historian to navigate. ... More

Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a sizable expansion in the number and variety of science and medicine periodicals, making it difficult terrain for a twenty-first-century historian to navigate. This chapter provides a preliminary map, exploring the large-scale developments in formats and readers over the course of the century through "samplings and soundings." It also examines the factors that lay behind those developments, including technological and commercial ones as well as factors more intrinsic to the sciences. The chapter shows that the gradual cheapening of print was one of the overriding factors in the proliferation of science periodicals over the period, itself resulting from the introduction of new technologies of production and distribution, the expansion of reading audiences, and the gradual reduction in taxation. Nevertheless, the publication of financially viable periodicals for scientific specialists continued to be a major challenge to editors and publishers. Partly in consequence, many of the periodicals continued to make their appeal to more or less diverse audiences that increasingly included a range of occupational groups. It was only towards the end of the century that journals began to be produced that were aimed primarily at university-based scientific professionals.Less

The Polymathic Artisan

Chandak Sengoopta

in The Rays Before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India

This chapter shows how Upendrakishore Ray, after beginning his career as a photographer, mastered the then radically new technology of half-tone photography—essential for the printing of ... More

This chapter shows how Upendrakishore Ray, after beginning his career as a photographer, mastered the then radically new technology of half-tone photography—essential for the printing of photographs—and, despite lacking any formal training, became the premier block-maker for Calcutta’s leading illustrated periodicals and improved existing techniques sufficiently to find real, though fleeting, recognition in Britain and America. The chapter not only argues that small entrepreneurs like Upendrakishore were important in the colonial, semi-capitalistic context for generating innovations, but also examines changes in Bengali print culture that made it viable for Upendrakishore to practise the new technology. The chapter also explores Upendrakishore’s contributions to music and children’s literature, paying particular attention to Sandesh, the magazine he founded in 1913 and which sought to educate today’s children to be tomorrow’s citizens.Less

Spacing

in Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

This chapter focuses on the relationship between typographic elements and white space on the page, and the readerly ramifications of these various configurations. It traces a fine line between ... More

This chapter focuses on the relationship between typographic elements and white space on the page, and the readerly ramifications of these various configurations. It traces a fine line between material practice and phenomenological effect. The ways that publishers, authors, and readers (when they mark margins or otherwise mark the space of a page) use and work with the spacing of a printed page raise an important question about printed matter: how does the physical layout of the page as a product of print technologies form and inflect readers' experience of and interaction with the printed page as an object of use and source of meaning? How does page layout lend the text an affective potential, a stimulating force? This chapter shows that the printed page is not simply an inert object of technical manipulation; it is rather a phenomenon with which humans interact. It is in this interaction, in the inextricable link of the technical and the human, that print exits.Less

Networked Melville

John Haydock

in Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance

Conventional academic criticism of the works of Herman Melville does not include agreement that the author knew or was influenced by the contemporary and popular French writer Honoré de Balzac until ... More

Conventional academic criticism of the works of Herman Melville does not include agreement that the author knew or was influenced by the contemporary and popular French writer Honoré de Balzac until very late in his life. However, the nature of the literary and technological networks of the mid-nineteenth century, along with an examination of important texts, suggests that Melville was not only seeking to rival the Frenchman as a competitor in book sales, but through study and guidance from his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, attempting to infuse Balzac’s vision of unity of composition into a new American proto-Realist genre.Less

Windmills and Woodblocks: Agnes Miller Parker, Wood Engraving and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain

Kristin Bluemel

in Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention

Using artist and wood engraver Agnes Miller Parker’s career as a case study, Kristin Bluemel argues that the so-called wood engraving revival reached its symbolic consolidation as an elite practice ... More

Using artist and wood engraver Agnes Miller Parker’s career as a case study, Kristin Bluemel argues that the so-called wood engraving revival reached its symbolic consolidation as an elite practice for the masses only upon the successful integration of Miller Parker’s wood engravings in the 1930s nature books of Victor Gollancz. Miller Parker’s illustrated editions of H. E. Bates’s Through the Woods (1936) and Down the River (1937) confirmed in the public imagination associations of the black and white forms of wood engraving with rustic landscapes and natural subjects even as it was seen to ‘elevate’ into art the mass marketed Gollancz books in which these wood engravings appeared. This chapter shows how circulations between antique ‘craft’, modern reproductive print technologies, and rural subjects placed Parker and her art at the centre of the drama of modernity even as she tried to conduct a quiet life on Britain’s rural peripheries.Less

Connecting Germans: The Circuitry of National Knowledge

Jason D. Hansen

in Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914

Networks are the focus of the fourth chapter, with a particular eye to the circuitry that connected the creators of these images of the national community with the public sphere. This circulation, ... More

Networks are the focus of the fourth chapter, with a particular eye to the circuitry that connected the creators of these images of the national community with the public sphere. This circulation, this chapter argues, played a critical role in legitimizing and authenticating maps and statistics of nationality as “scientific” and “accurate” documents. Once again technology also plays a role in the story, as the increasingly lower cost of printing enabled the foundation of geographic journals such as Petermanns Mitteilungen and Globus, who brought “serious” maps of nationality to the public sphere. By the 1880s, the school system, reference works and nationalist pressure groups also helped further build the credibility of these images.Less

The Charismatic Monk and the Chanting Masses: Master Yinguang and His Pure Land Revival Movement

Jan Kiely

in Making Saints in Modern China

This chapter analyzes the first Buddhist mass movement in modern Chinese history. The movement took place in and around Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city during the 1920s and 1930s, and its ... More

This chapter analyzes the first Buddhist mass movement in modern Chinese history. The movement took place in and around Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city during the 1920s and 1930s, and its leader was Yinguang, a Pure Land Buddhist master who emphasized discipline and simplicity. Yinguang was conversant with the new print technology that was changing China’s social and intellectual landscape. He also received the enthusiastic support of Shanghai’s influential and wealthy lay Buddhist elites, who were comfortable with the West but remained loyal to China’s cultural traditions and wary of the iconoclasm of the May Fourth revolutionaries. Kiely charts both the surprising growth of the movement, as well as its limitations: Yinguang’s wealthy patrons were distrustful of the mass enthusiasm generated by the monk, and by the “superstitious” practices associated with Yinguang’s mass following.Less

Going Online to go ‘Home’: Yizkor Books, Cyber-Shtetls, and Communities of Location

Rachel Leah Jablon

in Connected Jews: Expressions of Community in Analogue and Digital Culture

This chapter focuses on online yizkor and Cyber-Shtetls that give access to the places where Jewish life once flourished and are otherwise inaccessible due to the Holocaust. It discusses how ... More

This chapter focuses on online yizkor and Cyber-Shtetls that give access to the places where Jewish life once flourished and are otherwise inaccessible due to the Holocaust. It discusses how communities of the online yizkor and Cyber-Shtetls draw attention to changes in contemporary Jewish identity formation and the mediation of Jewish social connection in the digital age. It also explores how online yizkor books and Cyber-Shtetls that give people who are searching for 'home' a place to go and provide space that they occupy on the web as a surrogate for the real thing. The chapter mentions Benedict Anderson, who argues that the metropolitan daily newspaper represents a convergence of market capitalism and print technology that emerged at the start of the Industrial Revolution. It discloses the resulting 'communities of location' that are salient in Jewish life and culture that the Yiddish described the people who come from one geographic place as landsman.Less

Photography and Illustration

Frances Robertson

in The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 3: Competition and Disruption, 1900-2017

This chapter examines press images as an interaction between visual and technological/ economic constraints and opportunities of print technology in dialogue with other mediums of mass communication ... More

This chapter examines press images as an interaction between visual and technological/ economic constraints and opportunities of print technology in dialogue with other mediums of mass communication throughout the twentieth century, including an account of different workers and their expertise in visual production such as printers, graphic designers, art directors or commercial photographers. The opening question was why and how news images (initially technically challenging and expensive) have only gained in importance across the twentieth century. In addition, the narrative scope across Britain and Ireland in this collected press history allowed this chapter to engage with the role of news images in processes of nation building since the rise of Irish independence and to offer a different analysis from other accounts of visual journalism in press history, which may be either more general in scope, or focused on one specific time or place. Instead, the chapter examined diverging practices under the local cultural conditions developing in Ireland (South and North) and Great Britain, and the role of images within the ‘imagined communities’ sketched by particular publications as varied as Picture Post or An Phoblacht.Less

Mapping Germans: Making the Cultural Nation Visible

Jason D. Hansen

in Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914

This second chapter moves on to look at the scientific devices used to bring such knowledge to the public, focusing in particular on the development of European cartography in the middle of the ... More

This second chapter moves on to look at the scientific devices used to bring such knowledge to the public, focusing in particular on the development of European cartography in the middle of the nineteenth century. The chapter shows the weakness of the first attempts to depict nationality on maps, whose lack of graphic precision and inability to develop a comprehensible and consistent visual code rendered them unsuitable for formal use in politics. The chapter then charts the ways in which these limitations were overcome, so that by the 1870s new printing techniques and cheaper production costs helped make the nationality maps of men like Richard Böckh and Heinrich Kiepert increasingly believableLess