Le Danger des liaisons: Censoring Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses

When Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses first appeared in late March 1782, it was an immediate succès de scandale. Laclos’s focus on his characters’ libertine psychology and his creation of a “monstrous” female villain, Merteuil, distinguished the novel from mainstream eighteenth-century French works. As an analysis of the novel’s reception demonstrates, Laclos’s suggestive portrayal of female sexuality and empowerment—and, specifically, of Merteuil—led first to the text’s association with dangerous works known as “mauvais livres” or “livres philosophiques” such as the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1791) and the anonymous Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier de Chartreux (1741), and later contributed to its classification as a pornographic work at the time the concept was invented in the early nineteenth century—and, ultimately, to its censorship in 1823. If the novel was devoid of explicitly sexual scenes, it nonetheless elicited such images in the minds of (at least some of) its readers and thereby caught the attention of the authorities. Les Liaisons dangereuses may be one of the most prominent historical cases of a book being banned not for what was depicted in its pages, but for the fantasies it inspired—providing a compelling twist to the adage that “pornography is in the eyes of the beholder,” or the mind of the reader.     

‘Unfurling the banner of reform’: public opinion,nationalism, and Facts and Figures from Italy

This article reconsiders the neglected Italian correspondence of the Cork-born wit, essayist, and journalist, Francis Sylvester Mahony (‘Father Prout’). Re-assessing his traditional reputation as a Tory polemicist, it explores his movement away from the conservative, pro-Union politics of his contributions to Fraser's Magazine in the 1830s, and examines how, despite his continuing rejection of popular O'Connellite nationalism, he came to offer a broadly sympathetic portrait of Young Ireland in the articles he contributed to the London Daily News in the 1840s. It also traces the development of his political thinking at the beginning of the Famine era, focusing, in particular, on the influence of the resurgent nationalist movement in Italy on his reassessment of the Irish question.     

巴黎通信社始末

论文对巴黎通信社的创立及其运作情况进行了考述。巴黎通信社适逢1919年巴黎和会的召开应运诞生。它最先发回了中国代表团在山东问题上交涉失败的消息,成为引发五四运动的源头之一。巴黎和会结束后,它继续向国内媒体供稿,注重介绍欧洲社会主义运动和苏俄现状,对留法勤工俭学运动也作了持续的报道。少年中国学会曾计划在巴黎通信社的基础上建立一个国际通讯网,但因条件不足而未能实现。     

‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

The paper considers William Morris's belief that modern language was ‘degraded’, and explores how his late fiction tried to resist this degradation. Morris was influenced by the romantic philology of the mid-Victorian period which depicted languages as living organisms. Philologists such as Max Müller claimed that modern civilization had arrested this growth, mechanizing language into conventional signs; and Morris adapted the idea into a critique of industrial capitalism. He conceptualized modern English as manufactured external forms, sundered from organic history. His late prose fictions trace the ‘natural’ meanings of words which he imagined feudalism and capitalism had suppressed. However, this narrative of organic origins existed in tension with Morris's socialist ideals, which sought an objective language above local or national perspectives. The older Morris was writing at a time when romantic philology was coming under attack from a new generation of scholars. These proto-linguists regarded meaning as conventional and narratives of organic ‘roots’ in the distant past as mere mythology. Morris's struggles to reconcile the contradictions in his philosophy of language reflect wider tensions in romantic philology. His imaginary worlds in which everyone spoke the same relied upon myths of original linguistic unity and stasis which new research and theories were undermining. Ironically, Morris's attempts to re-organicize English inadvertently demonstrated the conventionality and perspectivism of language, relying upon common cultural frames of reference.     

影艺的政治:一九三0年代中期的中央电影检查委员会研究

Threatened by the thriving leftwing film industry, the Nationalist Party became more conservative. They set up the Central Film Censorship Committee as an important link in the system of film censorship, further tightening the control over film production. It was a substitute for the former Film Censorship Committee under the Ministries of Education and Interior. The committee achieved its original goals, but the result of its work did not fully conform to the party’s initial expectations. Translated by Zhou Weiwei from Lishi Yanjiu 历史研究 (Historical Research), 2006, (2): 62–78     

谈谈如何加强和改进地方经济报道工作

随着我国经济社会的不断发展,经济报道El益成为新闻宣传报道的重点。结合青海实际做好新闻宣传工作,必须进一步加大地方经济新闻宣传报道的力度。在新形势下,只有切实坚持把握导向、突出特色和提高质量的要求,才能不断提高地方经济新闻宣传报道的水平。     

浅析负面新闻信息传播的积极作用

新闻报道必须坚持弘扬主旋律,但也应通过积极有效的传播使一些负面新闻信息发挥正面的作用。只要坚持新闻的党性原则,准确理解和切实把握新闻信息的负面性,就能够使一些负面的新闻信息传播成为国家政策和制度层面的一种完善,并通过有效的警示和激励发挥大众媒体舆论监督的重要作用。     

浅谈重大新闻事件的战役性报道

新闻的战役性报道对于提高重大新闻的宣传报道质量,扩大报道面等都具有十分重要的作用。在竞争越来越激烈的新闻宣传领域,新闻的战役性报道已成为一种不可或缺的竞争手段。     

新闻采编细节刍议

在新闻采编的过程中，我们不仅应注重新闻采编能力的提高，更要高度关注新闻采编的细节。细节体现着事物的本质，细节关系着事物的整体形象，细节决定着我们事业的成败。要做好新闻采编工作，必须注重体现细节的作用和魅力。     

An argument manqué: Kate O'Brien's Pray for the Wanderer

Kate O'Brien wrote Pray for the Wanderer (1938) as a riposte to the Irish Censorship of Publications Board for the banning of her novel Mary Lavelle (1936). While Irish writers routinely fell afoul of the government, Pray for the Wanderer stands alongside only Liam O'Flaherty's The Puritan (1932) as a novelistic response to censorship. However, despite the historical importance of these two books to Irish Studies, there has been very little of substance written on either of them. It has instead become a short-hand method of discussing censorship for scholars to simply gesture towards these works and their authors as exemplary. In the end, this approach does nothing to enhance our understanding of how censorship functions, the contentious debates it engenders, or the social nature of such a text. The article addresses these lacunae by examining Pray for the Wanderer as a critique of censorship. By setting the novel alongside contemporary press reports and editorials, the article demonstrates that while the book might be critical of censorship and its effects on artists, there is much in it that undermines the anti-censorship position it purportedly takes.