The meaning of literacy: an Italian reappraisal

Abstract

This article discusses the literacy trend in modern Italy in the light of recent literature on history of reading and, more generally, cultural history. The focus is on two subjects: (1) the essential features of Italian literacy in the modern age, highlighting elements such as heavy censorship, hostility to compulsory education from the ruling classes, training essentially based on voice and memorizing, etc., and (2) the uses of literacy, that is the access to and the comprehension of written texts, especially regarding people with minimal skills or cut off from college training (i.e. children, women and peasants).     

‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde,Charles Ricketts,and the Art of the Woman's World

This paper offers a new examination of the influential women's magazine, theWoman's World (1887–90), and Oscar Wilde's editorship thereof. Previous studies have focused on the magazine's importance as a venue for promoting proto-feminist writing and for enabling Wilde to boost his professional cachet through editorial work, but the aesthetic aims and execution of theWoman's World merit further analysis. The Woman's World reveals how male artists negotiated aesthetics and Aestheticism between themselves within its pages, as well as how they presented it to the publication's assumed audience of women. This paper particularly centres on the magazine's role in establishing the professional relationship between Wilde and Charles Ricketts, later the designer and illustrator of some of Wilde's most important texts, while simultaneously considering how Ricketts's work furthered the artistic and intellectual instruction Wilde hoped to offer the magazine's readers. Case studies of several of Ricketts's illustrations demonstrate the types of visual reading that the Woman's World seemed to espouse, and which worked in tandem with the textual contents to encourage women to develop critical reading skills.     

The Riksdag,the state bureaucracy and the administration of hospitals in eighteenth‐century Sweden

Traditionally, the Norwegian modernization process has been presented as a success story that focuses on how social movements and democratized political institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries laid the foundations for a society and culture with an emphasis on social equality. The paper offers an alternative analysis of this process, based not on the issue of material equality and inequality, but on the concepts of normality and deviance. A comparison of the development of the Norwegian national education policy since the middle of the 19th century with the Danish and Swedish experiences involves the exclusion of the dissimilar as a distinct feature of the Norwegian policy. ‘Disability’ was constructed as a category of deviance by public policies and administrative and professional practice. The professions – particularly teachers and doctors – were important actors who offered alternative conceptions of normality and disability. However, the constructions that they selected were those that were in closest dialogue with the particular challenges confronted by the Norwegian modernisation process: first the liberal, then the social democratic construction. Because the national conditions confronting the Scandinavian modernization processes differed from each other, so did the related constructions of disability.     

睡虎地秦简《编年记》性质探测

睡虎地十一号秦墓出土的秦简文献《编年记》,应当为墓主平日阅读的一种历史读物。至于其中的私家记事及秦王政(始皇)十一年以后的时事新闻,当为墓主标注,以备遗忘,类似后世的"记事珠"之类。因此,《编年记》不能算成喜的私家历史著述,而是当时通行历史读物的留存。这已得到新考古发现的强力证明。     

Reading menageries: using eighteenth-century print sources to historicise the sensorium of menagerie spectators and their encounters with exotic animals

Histories of exotic animal collection and display in Britain during the long eighteenth century have not been conventionally concerned with the sensory or bodily experiences of menagerie spectators. Olfactory, haptic and aural impressions – as well as the affective responses of laughter, disgust, anger and sympathy, are conspicuously absent in attempts to historicise animal collections. This paper principally argues that these often historically intangible and transient sensory experiences with animals were culturally significant acts or readings that produced meaning. To understand how spectators utilised their senses as an interpretive tool in reading menageries the article draws upon eighteenth-century understandings of the senses and bodily comfort. The manipulation of exotic animal bodies in menageries during the long eighteenth century had significant implications for British spectators. It is argued that their specific notions of Britishness in relationship to these captive animals from foreign climes articulated elite cultural notions of gender, climate and national character. In writing a sensory history of exotic animals in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain the author contextualises the reading of contemporary print material with the concomitant experience of the material animals to which this print matter referred. What emerges is a reminder that the act of reading should not be isolated from the production of knowledge through other embodied experiences since such a dichotomy is arguably problematic for historians.     

唐人小说中文士的隐读模式及其文化心理透析

唐人小说中,许多题材涉及到文士的隐居修业。我们以此为切入基点,来探讨文士的隐读模式,其反映出来的文化心理主要包括文士对婚姻与性爱的向往与追求、“以色当婚”的风习、好奇的时代风尚及文人“仕”、“隐”的矛盾性心态。此外,唐代“坟寺”风俗等寺院文化对文士的隐读也有一定的影响。     

旅游信息来源类型对消费者行为意图的影响

如何高效利用和改变消费者对信息来源的判别特点,并使其在营销战略设计中发挥作用,是营销人员重点关注的现实命题。通过了解消费者对信息来源类型的利用程度,营销人员可以运用高效方式来设计和影响传播渠道。本研究在实体化旅游信息来源类型的基础上,通过构建量表实测,定量化分析了旅游信息来源类型对消费者行为意图的影响。结果显示:(1)消费者认知对旅游信息来源类型有明确的界定和划分,不同类型的旅游信息来源会呈现规律的聚类现象;(2)人际传播的旅游信息来源对消费者行为意图仍然发挥着独特的影响作用;(3)有效阅读时间是旅游信息来源类型对消费者行为意图产生影响的重要限制因素;(4)电视和休闲媒介类旅游信息传播效果对消费者行为意图影响不大。该结论对旅游营销广告投放及营销渠道选择均具有一定的参照意义;(5)人口结构特征中,职业和月收入差异对旅游信息来源类型选择影响较大;性别、年龄、教育程度及年出游次数对旅游信息来源类型选择影响较小。     

Lanhydrock’s autobiographical instillation: books,reputation, and habitat in early modern England

The library at Lanhydrock in Cornwall contains many books annotated by its seventeenth-century owners. The complex meanings these books carried depended on their physical location in the Cornish landscape, and the meaning of that landscape was in turn shaped by the presence of the marked books. Early moderns were adept at creating and interpreting such context-specific assemblages of books which projected autobiographical personae. These habits were a means by which book-users could simultaneously fit themselves to their environments (or “habitats”) and reshape those environments in a reciprocal process of fashioning. Public reputation was an important consideration guiding these practices. This model of the interaction of books, reputation, and habitat can be extended beyond physical locations like Lanhydrock to help understand how early moderns inhabited their economic culture. Customizing books shaped users as agents equipped with the kind of habitus demanded by the “credit economy” and reproduced its moral codes.