Religion and the cultural public sphere: the case of the Finnish liberal intelligentsia during the turmoil of the early twentieth century

The political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.     

Make-believe: fashion and Cinelandia in Rizzoli's Lei (1933–38)

Amidst the wide array of women's magazines published in Italy in the 1930s, Lei. Rivista di vita femminile presents a compelling case study of the make-believe effect achieved through fashion and the allure of the silver screen. Published by Angelo Rizzoli between 1933 and 1938, Lei stands out for a cosmopolitan, American-looking lifestyle that champions an Italian ‘new woman’, aware of her own new image and enmeshed in a fantastic world of romantic novels and movie stars. This essay studies the paradoxes and complexities of an Italian illustrated periodical promoting the image of a fashionable woman in the midst of growing imperialism and autarchy, and publishing the work of Leica photographers, Lucio Ridenti and Paul Wolff in particular. Lei reflects the fundamental ambivalence of this time, promoting Italian fashion through Hollywood as a way to counteract the French fashion industry, and inviting women to role-play through the allure of their image.     

A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth‐Century South

Recent work on southern women and intellectual life in the nineteenth‐century South has focused on women novelists. Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to literary periodicals as important vehicles through which women earned financial reward and often regional or national reputations as authors and editors. Perhaps most significantly, southern women viewed periodicals as opportunities to speak out boldly on politics and current events, much more so than in the novel. The wide availability after 1820 of magazines and newspapers, made possible by their low cost and portability, provided the perfect forum for women who wished to push against traditional gender boundaries. In examining southern women’s contributions to early nineteenth‐century periodical culture, one sees a vital part of the foundation being laid for later movements for women’s suffrage.     

‘You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!’: Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press

In December 1893 the Conservative candidate for Flintshire addressed an audience at Mold Constitutional Club. After he had finished attacking Gladstone and the local Liberal incumbent, he ended his speech with a joke. He advised the Conservative party to adopt, with regard to the government, the sign of an American undertaker: ‘You kick the bucket; we do the rest’. How did a sign belonging to a Nevadan undertaker become the subject of a joke told at a political meeting in North Wales? This unlikely question forms the basis of this article. Using new digital archives, it tracks the journey of the gag from its origins in New York, its travels around America, its trip across the Atlantic, its circulation throughout Britain and its eventual leap into political discourse. The article uses the joke to illuminate the workings of a broader culture of transatlantic reprinting. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century miscellaneous ‘snippets’ cut from the pages of the American press became a staple feature of Britain's bestselling newspapers and magazines. This article explores how these texts were imported, circulated and continually rewritten in dynamic partnership between authors, editors and their readers.     

中国报刊生产的空间特征与区域发展趋势预测

报刊的出版发行工作的效果与报刊生产地的空间区位密切相关。目前国内外地理学界对此问题的研究见诸文字的还不多见,这一研究领域急待发展。本文分析了我国报刊生产空间分布特征,划分了报刊生产的空间功能类型区;进行了报刊生产的区域发展趋势预测。     

Book-hunters and Book-huntresses: Gender and Cultures of Antiquarian Book Collecting in Britain,c. 1880–1900

The late-nineteenth century saw private book collecting gain a renewed respectability and cultural cachet as a leisure pursuit for the upper- and middle classes. This paper examines representations of collectors in the literature belonging to a new genre of writing which emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the book-collecting passion which could encompass aesthetes and antiquarians as well as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how, during the 1880s and 1890s, this particular type of collecting practice was used rhetorically in a range of printed material to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to feminine forms of engagement with old books in particular. In spite of women's comparative lack of advantage in the market for antiquarian editions, however, I argue that such a critique would not have been articulated so forcefully had women not been taking a determined interest in rare books. Evidence from central London booksellers during this period suggests that a variety of women were making antiquarian collections of their own. Male bibliophiles who denigrated female book-buyers in the periodical press were attempting to partially invent a homosocial tradition of collecting in order to distance their own pursuit from what they saw as the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments.     

20世纪30年代报刊媒介与西北开发

在20世纪30年代,中国面临着严重的经济危机、政治危机和民族危机,各报刊杂志纷纷刊登开发西北边疆的文章,喊出了开发西北的呼声。各有识之士利用报刊这一信息工具来研究西北、宣传西北;为开发西北制造舆论,推动了南京国民政府对西北的开发。但最终实效十分有限。     

Portraits of the Poor in Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Journalism

This paper compares the social-exploration literature of radical, mostly Owenite and Chartist, and liberal journalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the focus is on the less known ‘portraits of the poor’ in radical papers. In the paper I argue that against the developing liberal practice of intricately mapping poverty and categorizing the poor, radical papers under-represented particular cases of poverty, using an obfuscating syntax to document the poor. In doing so, radicals differentiated themselves from their middle-class counterparts, primarily as a way to challenge the assumption that poverty was a function of individual error and to turn the public’s gaze onto the social causes of poverty. Highlighting the political dimensions of poverty and minimizing the language of ‘personal responsibility’, radicals demonstrated that the activist agenda concerned itself with the economic and social as much as with the political, even while offering political solutions to economic and social problems.     

‘The Most Churlish of Celebrities’: George Eliot,John Cross and the Question of High Status

Published in 1885, John Cross's biography of his late wife, George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, was written with the intention to ‘make known the woman as well as the author’ (John Cross, ed., George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, cabinet edn, 3 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1887), I, v). Yet, ironically, the biography is renowned precisely for the lack of insight it affords readers into the private life of George Eliot. Why did Cross make a promise that he could not keep? My essay attempts to answer this question by examining George Eliot's Life in the context of the fame culture of the late nineteenth century. I suggest that it is possible to read Cross's unwillingness in the Life to make Eliot more ‘available’ to her public as a reaction against the sorts of publicity which, throughout the 1870s, had pushed Eliot's persona into a celebrity arena. George Eliot's Life represents Cross's effort to preserve Eliot's high professional reputation by emphasizing her distance from celebrity culture and her status as a female sage. Through close examination of the reviews of the biography, I identify the contemporary attitudes that made stressing Eliot's greatness appear urgent to her biographer and, paradoxically, so unpopular with the general public. I call attention, in particular, to changing expectations about the relationship between public figures and their audiences as well as the purpose and content of famous Lives. ?1.?Leon Edel, ed., The Diary of Alice James (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 40–41.      

Christmas in the Workhouse: Staging Philanthropy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical

This article provides an overview of the representation of workhouse philanthropy in the nineteenth-century periodical. In the 1830s and 40s, the popular representation of the workhouse was of a cruel institution in which paupers were systematically beaten and starved. However, the ideological significance of the workhouse shifts in the depictions of privately funded philanthropy that proliferated in magazines and newspapers during the Christmas publishing season. In representations of the workhouse at Christmas, paupers are shown receiving gifts and enjoying entertainments against a festively decorated backdrop. Middle-class benevolence is at the heart of these Christmas performances: these treats are not funded by the poor rates, but by individuals, who are frequently depicted in attendance at the workhouse Christmas. The institution, now redolent with ideas of care, charity and goodwill, functions in these texts as a stage for the projection of a bourgeois philanthropic self; the reader, the audience of this ideological performance, is encouraged to self-identify with the middle-class values that overlay these workhouse scenes. Entwined with these depictions of private philanthropy are underlying ideas of discipline and control. Just as the middle-class guests enact an idealized identity, so too do the paupers enact the role of the indebted and grateful poor. This article examines how the nineteenth-century periodical constructs the workhouse as a performance space for the middle classes; it explores the various agendas of these constructions and analyses the ideological messages they convey.