British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45 ed. by Alexis Easley (review)

The early nineteenth century was a period of new media innovation– an era that produced a wide variety of book, periodical and newspaper formats that were available to larger and more diversified reading publics than ever before. The efflorescence of print culture during this era was enabled by the rise of popular literature and education movements as well as the expansion of rail networks, advancements in printing and paper-making technology, and a reduction of the stamp duty. During this period, publishers not only experimented with serial formats– from penny papers to the part-publication of novels– but also explored synergies between text and image, producing, for example, the elegant steel-cut engravings of literary annuals and the innovative wood-cut illustrations incorporated into children’s books and comic magazines. The twelve chapters in this collection are intended to promote greater understanding of the period between 1820 and 1845 as an era of innovation in nineteenth-century print culture. These essays also draw attention to the ways in which our access to this history is enabled by twenty-first-century technologies– digitization, keyword searches and distant reading– that provide access to the periodicals, newspapers and rare books that fuel and shape our research.

The period between 1820 and 1845 is often interpreted as a transitional phrase between the Romantic and Victorian periods. Some individual writers working in this era– for example, Felicia Hemans, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle– have received significant critical attention, but many other new media innovators of the period have been neglected in histories of nineteenth-century literature. This is especially true of writers who worked in the popular press, including Dinah Mulock, Mary Howitt, and William Hazlitt. What made these writers significant was their engagement with the rise of new media– annuals, serial publication, weekly periodicals, newspapers, and illustrated magazines. These genres were associated with the emergence of a “mass media”– periodicals and newspapers that reached a broad national audience with circulations in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Working within these new media formats, writers experimented with literary forms designed to appeal to artisans and the middle classes as well as family audiences that explicitly included women and children. Their innovations radically changed literary culture, leading to the rise of sentimental poetry, social-problem fiction, children’s literature, and diverse other genres. Many writers during this era also worked as editors of annuals, magazines, and other periodical literature, thus playing a crucial role in shaping the new media formats in which popular literature would be shaped and consumed.

The first edited essay collection of its kind to focus on innovators and innovations in the mass-market press from 1820–45 Explores 1820–45 as a crucial era in the development of the modern press Promotes greater understanding of the period between 1820 and 1845 as an era of innovation in nineteenth-century print culture Each chapter is designed as a case study that models ways of entering into a vast field of study, drawing attention to the interactivity of readers, editors, publishers and print forms in a period of unprecedented change Draws attention to the ways in which our access to this history is enabled by twenty-first-century technologies – digitization, keyword searches and distant reading – that provide access to the periodicals, newspapers and rare books that fuel and shape our research Explores intersections between periodicals, books and newspapers within the media system of the period, demonstrating how change affected not only individual titles but also a broader media ecology in which old media were adapted to new contexts and the launch of new publications produced and harnessed new readerships The emergence of a mass reading public during the early decades of the nineteenth century sparked a period of creative innovation in the popular press. This collection focuses on the early decades of the nineteenth century as a key period of innovation in the popular press. Steam printing, popular education campaigns, and new technologies of illustration led to new trends in book and periodical production.

The trend of online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic has driven English Literature lecturers to come up with effective ways of teaching literature. Concerning this issue, this research aims to analyze how literature, especially popular literature, is taught online. Focusing on the socio-cultural pedagogic principles, the approach of teaching popular literature is examined using a qualitative descriptive approach. This study was conducted at English Literature Department, Adab and Humanity Faculty, UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya, involving two popular literature lecturers. The data were obtained through interviews, observations, and documentation and analyzed using the interactive analysis method. It was found that the socio-cultural pedagogic principles were applied partially. (1) the principle of engagement was applied by warming-up questions, mind-mapping technique, mentioning adjectives, and watching movie trailers, (2) the principle of intelligibility was not applied because the lecturers explained the theory of genre and sub-genre characteristics before giving examples, and (3) the principle of participation was applied by delivering quizzes through various online platforms, like Google Classroom, Mentimeter, and Kahoot! and giving tasks which were uploaded in UIN Sunan Ampel’s e-learning system, SAILS ‘Sunan Ampel Integrated Learning Service’. The significance of these findings will contribute to the teaching and learning process of popular literature. Besides, the results will provide insight for popular literature lecturers to apply a better teaching approach.

In the development of world literature, English literature has played a great role in promoting the development of world literature. In this paper, the English literature as a starting point for research, further from the Victorian era critical realism novels, colonial novel and popular novel three aspects discusses the image of the East Victorian literary works. Although the criticism of the real work in the performance of the exotic interest, but the role of exotic is still only play a supporting role. In the works of colonial novels, more and more double understanding in the treatment of exotic customs reflects, which also makes the eastern style of the colonial novels reflect more fictional elements. But in popular literature, it shows more interest in the East.

The article analyzes the possibilities of using literary texts in English lessons in non-linguistic faculties of universities. The linguistic approach, the principles of selection of literary texts are considered, the meaning of pre-text, pre-text and post-text work is revealed. In addition, the article examines the possibility and necessity of using foreign-language popular science texts in teaching a foreign language to first-years students of non-linguistic faculties of universities, as well as characterizing the style of scientific and popular science literature in English. Moreover, various aspects of popular science text have been investigated in comparison with other types of scientific literature.

The first comprehensive history of New Zealand literature, this volume includes chapters on the novel, poetry, and the short story, as well as sections on drama, non-fiction, children's literature, popular literature, and the history of publishing, patronage, and literary magazines. While it features major authors, this history also contains information on little-known authors and forgotten periods in New Zealand's literary history, providing more comprehensive information on the subject than has ever appeared in a single volume before.

The association's ninety-seventh convention will he held 5–7 November 1999 at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, under the sponsorship of the dean of Letters and Sciences and the Departments of English and Languages and Literatures. Inger Olsen is serving as local chair. The program will represent the association members' diverse interests in all matters of language and literature in classical, Western, and non-Western languages. The thirty-one general sessions will include papers on classical, Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, English, American, and Asian literatures, as well as on linguistics, rhetoric, gay and lesbian literature, film, matrilineal culture, autobiography, poetry and poetics, and critical theory. Among the thirty special sessions are sessions on picaresque literature, Shakespeare and popular literature, Native American literature, Russian literature, Slavic literature, Toni Morrison in the 1990s, Caribbean literature, and cybertextbooks in foreign language education. Several special sessions have been organized by Portland State University and PAMLA affiliate organizations Women in French, MELUS, and the Milton Society of America. Registration at the conference will be $35 and $25. All paper sessions are scheduled for classrooms at Portland State University and will begin Friday at 1:00 p.m. and end Sunday at 1:00 p.m.

This article examines the impact of commercial practices on popular American and British literature by analyzing the usage made since World War II of brand names and generic names in the scripts of a selected set of hit plays performed on the New York stage and the London stage. Taken together with the results of an earlier study on popular American novels, the findings lend support to the charges of increasing commercial influence in the popular literature of the postwar era. The findings also underscore the significance of earlier conceptualizations such as “word-of-author advertising” as well as commercial and non-commercial forms of materialism.

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Humor in the Lyrical Stories for Children of Samuel Marshak and Korney Chukovsky Andreas Bode (bio) The literary scholar is seized by a kind of culture shock when he discovers that the authors of his native tongue for whom he has high regard and whom he considers as world classic writers are not highly rated abroad, and may even be completely unknown. In turn, there may be classic writers in other languages of whom he has a completely distorted image because he knows only a part of their works. Not knowing the Russian language, he may consider Pushkin, for instance, as the author of original stories, and perhaps even know that he wrote the libretto for the operetta "Eugene Onegin." But he will not be likely to realize the essential significance that Pushkin's epic poem, which served as the basis for the opera, also had for the language and literature of Russia. Naturally it is the lyrical works which suffer more than all others in the literary transfer process. Even if there are a number of well-intended English translations of Pushkin's poems, the reader will at best only be able to infer that Pushkin is one of the great lyricists of world literature. The situation is none the better for the two Russian poets Marshak and Chukovsky, just because they wrote mainly for children. While the intellectual substance of their poems may be easier to grasp and to translate, it will never be possible even to begin to reproduce either the special wealth of Russian sounds or the allusions that result directly from the use of sound consonance. And it is precisely at the linguistic level, rather than the literal level, that a significant portion of the humor of both these poets is to be found. The humorous story-line, which could as easily be told in prose, is comparatively simple in many of their poems. The improbability that Marshak's and Chukovsky's poems for children will ever achieve greater significance in English is particularly regrettable, since both writers had a very close relationship to the English language and its literature. Not only did they translate important British and American writers into Russian, but they were also notably influenced by certain popular English poems—in particular, by their grotesque and absurdist elements. [End Page 34] Marshak travelled in 1912 to London to study English literature. By 1915 his first translation from English was published, and he eventually translated the work of William Blake, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Lear, even Shakespeare's sonnets, thus becoming one of the most important mediators of English poetry. Marshak also translated a series of popular English poems for children, and his own first book for children was a Russian adaptation of "The House that Jack Built" (Dom, kotoryj postroil Džek, 1924). Chukovsky first learned English on his own. He was then sent to London as a correspondent for the newspaper "Odesskie novosti" in 1903, and there he also began to report on English literature. He thus worked from the very beginning of his writing career as a literary critic, a craft he continued to practice until his death. One of his most important pieces dealt with Whitman, whose work he introduced to the Russian reader. Like Marshak, he translated many English works into Russian, but specialized in prose (Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton, A. C. Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and others). His treatment of Hugh Loftings "Dr. Doolittle" (Doktor Ajbolif) became a classic work for Russian children as a result of his clever abridgments of the very expansive stories and his successful adaption of Lofting's characters to a Russian setting. While he translated much less for children than did Marshak, the influence of popular English literature on his own works was the more enduring, as will be shown. Samuel Marshak (1887-1964) is considered by many to be—along with Vladimir Mayakovsky—the founder of Soviet children's literature. One can rightfully say that he was a foster child of Maxim Gorki. Their relationship began in 1901, when Gorki secured a place in a Yalta boarding school for the high school aged boy. It is well known that Gorki...

The French Revolution had a profound effect on almost all aspects of British culture. French events and ideas were avidly discussed and disputed in Britain. Long‐standing British political and cultural debates were given new life; new socio‐political ideologies rapidly emerged. The sense of political, religious and cultural crisis that developed in the 1790s was only slowly to dissipate. Generations afterwards, many British thinkers and writers were still considering and renegotiating their responses. The effect of the Revolution Crisis on British literature was particularly marked, something that was widely recognised at the time and has been the focus of much scholarship since. It has become something of a cliché that British literary Romanticism was born out of the Revolution. The last few decades have produced new waves of powerful criticism which has re‐examined the relationship between the Revolution Crisis and the works it shaped. Different strands of radical writing have now received detailed investigation, as have equally complex conservative responses. Writing by and for women is now receiving as much attention as writing by men, and previously neglected forms, such as the popular novel, pamphlets and children's literature, are now the subject of an increasing number of studies. The writing of the 1790s and early 1800s has in fact provided many scholars with their test‐case for exploring the very nature of the relationship between text and context. It is this profusion of recent, sophisticated and rapidly evolving scholarship which this article surveys.

In his 1957 collection of essays Mythologies Roland Barthes famously discussed the world’s most prominent cycle race Le Tour De France. He critiqued its popular mythologization within media, which he argued masked the economic motives of the event in favour of myths of heroic ordeal. Following Barthes promptings, and some six decades on, we consider the contemporary narrativization of cycle racing within English language popular literature. This extensive body of literature features popular histories, exposés of drug scandals and autobiographies. We offer critical readings in light of the broader economic and cultural contexts of cycling. The dominant discursive framing accords with the myths that Barthes identified: emphasising a glorious history/heritage, ‘great men’, heroic sacrifice, and honour and fairness within cycle racing. Even accounts of the endemic spectre of performance enhancing drug largely accommodate the myth, framing drug taking as a threat to the integrity of the sport. In doing so, the literature both deproblematises the human experiences of cycle racing, and affirms what Wieting terms the ‘the fiction of pure sport’ (350). Simultaneously, we also document the complexities and flaws in the mythical edifice revealed in recent confessional autobiographies, and riders’ accounts of the harsh and insecure life worlds of professional riders which reveals the material realities of cycle racing to confound the romantic myths.

‘Kung fu’ has become synonymous with the traditional Chinese martial arts in the popular imagination. Yet some practitioners and writers object to this usage, insisting instead on the adoption of other labels such as ‘wushu’. Increasingly authors in both the academic and more serious popular literatures are moving away from ‘kung fu’, as it is perceived to be both inauthentic and ahistorical. But is this really the case? The following article examines the use of ‘kung fu’ in both the Chinese and English language literatures on the martial arts from the middle of the 19 th century to the 1960s. It finds that the term’s adoption as a descriptor of a set of martial practices is older than is generally acknowledged. There are also specific regional and social reasons why certain Chinese martial artists have chosen to adopt and promote this term in describing their own practice. Like the traditional Chinese martial arts themselves, the term kung fu has meant many things to various practitioners in different times and places. By studying the evolution and spread of this terminology, students of martial studies can gain insight into the changing nature of the Chinese martial arts.

This article examines the relay translation of William Tufnell Le Queux’s (1864–1927) Strange Tales of a Nihilist, which the prominent Chinese translator of nihilist fiction, Chen Jinghan 陳景韓 (1878–1965), completed based on Matsui Shōyō’s 松居松葉 (1870–1933) Japanese rendering. By exploring the transcultural process through which a story of Russian nihilism traveled from Europe to East Asia, the author tests the translatability of the revolutionary structure of feeling across different cultures. The author reveals how English and Japanese media and literature inspired Chinese interpretations of Russian nihilism, and how a key Chinese translator channeled his own revolutionary commitments through intensive borrowing of traditional Chinese literary motifs and narrative devices. As a result, the Chinese vision of nihilism diverged from nihilism’s Russian political connotations and was assimilated into a thrilling cultural topos of vengeful assassination plots in Chinese popular culture. Ultimately, this transculturation of revolutionary sentimental, which aroused sinicized emotions of love and revenge, not only generated public sympathy for nihilists in China but also motivated Chinese revolutionary actions.