British Public Research Articles

Lost in Translation; The Evolution of Spanish Translations and the Black Legend in England from 1578 to 1740

This paper traces the evolution of the Black Legend using Spanish accounts of the colonization of the Americas published in English from 1578 to 1740. The Black Legend, largely spread by English, Dutch, and German Protestants, was an anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish narrative demonizing the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Relying in particular on the English appropriation of Spanish Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, originally published in Spanish in 1552, the thesis argues that English editions of the text reflect England's political and religious turmoil in the 16th and 18th centuries. Previous work on the Black Legend centered on how the authors of New World accounts intended to have their work received in Europe. By studying printed paratexts, including dedicatory letters to patrons, letters to the readers, and the translations themselves, I show how English publishers and translators, and the statesmen who sponsored these publications sought to use Bartolomé de Las Casas's accounts as political. The conquest of the New World brought enormous wealth and power to Spain. At the same time, throughout this period, England suffered religious and political conflicts that boiled over into civil war in the mid-17th century. Many in England feared being overrun by a Catholic Empire or overthrown by Catholics from within. Facing various religious and political crises at home English leaders and booksellers used translations of Las Casas's work to advance their own hopes of British imperial expansion in the New World and to encourage the English to unite in the face of the Spanish threats, such as the Netherlands Civil War and Spanish Armada.

Germany in the Melbourne Punch, 1855–1914: British Entanglement or Autonomous Developments?

This article explores the representation of Germany and the Germans in the pages of the Melbourne Punch (1855–1925). Grounding its imagery in contemporary racial stereotyping of Germans, Melbourne Punch commented in muted terms on German immigration and the events of 1870–71 but reacted with alarm at the sudden arrival of the Kaiserreich as an expanding imperial power in the Asia-Pacific in 1884–85. The consolidation of this presence in the 1890s, combined with the simultaneous threat posed to Australia’s security via Germany’s challenge to the Royal Navy, raised antagonism to extremes (more so than in comparable British publications like the London Punch). The fear of Prussian military culture threatening Australia’s liberal-British society was expressed palpably in ordinary weekly numbers, as well as in dedicated special issues of 1898 and 1909, which featured Germanophobic invasion stories, anticipating – but never approaching – the hatred towards the ‘Hun’ during the Great War.

Closing ranks: The Publishers Association in Victorian Britain and its powerful place in institutional formation

Professional associations have been explored as institutional agents and can be powerful mechanisms for instigating practices into an industry. Despite this identification there is a lack of research which delves deeper and explores the contexts that allow strategies which contribute to institutional formation; which in turn can create professional associations in the process. Through an analysis of archival letters and newspaper articles surrounding the formation of the net book agreement in the Victorian British publishing industry, this paper illustrates how individuals formed the Publishers Association to further their own causes and protect their business interests. This paper argues that the construction of the professional association was used as the vehicle for individuals with the most power in the Victorian publishing industry to instigate change.

Socially-distanced science: how British publics were imagined, modelled and marginalised in political and expert responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

In early 2021, the United Kingdom (UK) had the highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 of any large country. Yet it had previously been ranked as one of the best prepared countries for a future pandemic. This gap between preparedness and performance has been the subject of intense debate, including as part of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing process of reflection by identifying the imagined public(s) within the UK’s scientific advice system. Drawing on scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) that critiques framings of a singular or homogeneous ‘public’, we review meeting minutes and media briefings to reveal two imagined publics, co-constructed by the UK’s science advisors and policymakers in early 2020: first, a ‘freedom-loving’ public resistant to stringent policy interventions; and second, a public that was—in an echo of wartime rhetoric— ‘all in it together’. These imagined publics reflect a series of framing assumptions that help to make sense of the UK’s pandemic response. We focus particularly on the tensions between the homogeneous and multi-faceted imagined public, and the compound health and social inequalities that predated the pandemic but became starker and more visible as it unfolded. Our paper charts these tensions and demonstrates how these imagined publics went through stages of cohesion and fracture in the fraught early months of the pandemic. We conclude by considering the implications of this analysis for understanding the UK’s response to Covid-19, and for the future of scientific advice and emergency preparedness. Why does this matter? Studies of scientific advice reveal that how scientists and decision makers imagine the public and their concerns affect the communication of scientific advice, and the construction and value placed on relevant knowledge. Advisory scientists frame their models and their advice in terms of what they regard as politically possible.

Transatlantic Reprinting and the Authorizing Efforts of British Publishers

ABSTRACT DeSpain reviews The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860 by Katie McGettigan, published by University of Massachusetts Press. McGettigan’s book builds upon the foundational work of Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003) to argue that British publishers helped expand the scope and audience for American literature by creating editions of American authors’ works that lent them greater credibility. McGettigan’s study offers in-depth case studies of British editions of hallmark American authors, including Longfellow, Poe, Melville, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Drawing on a comprehensive body of research into publishers’ circulars, advertisements, and archives, McGettigan covers multiple media forms, including deluxe editions, the cheap series, the gift book, and the magazine. DeSpain argues McGettigan’s book is an important contribution that reimagines the scholarly narrative about transatlantic reprinting as one of collaboration rather than contest. McGettigan’s most important contribution is her extensive analysis of how the cheap series created a greater global context for literature, which will prove fruitful for new scholarship about the distribution and reception of the cheap series.

Media coverage of domestic violence-related issues in China

Domestic violence-related issues in China have attracted extensive attention since the Anti-Domestic Violence Law was implemented in 2016. This project builds on framing theory, the law and social movements perspective, and a discussion of ethnocentrism to address how the Chinese state-owned (English-language) and British privately-owned media represented domestic violence-related issues in China from 2016 to 2022. The findings of this research demonstrated that China Daily passively participated the simultaneous process of media campaign and legal tactic, referenced legal actors’ ideas on initiating top-down legal reform to close legal loopholes and improve the effectiveness of law enforcement, and educated the public to remove outdated traditional ideas. The Chinese media coverage on domestic violence-related issues can be characterized as taking a responsive approach, as they largely reference elite legal actors’ discourse on pragmatic solutions for domestic violence. Conversely, the British media broadened the discussion of domestic violence-related issues in China to critique socialist values and the Communist party (government). The Guardian and The Economist emphasized the importance of bottom-up feminist movements and individual activists’ contributions in ending domestic violence. The ethnocentrism of the British publications resulted in their overlooking Chinese law and social movements in the context of domestic violence.

A Handlist of Illustrated Early Solomonic Manuscripts in British Public Collections

As material objects bearing textual and visual information, illustrated Christian manuscripts from the Horn of Africa are among the most valuable sources of data for scholars specializing in this field. This article is the second handlist produced within the framework of the AHRC-DFG project Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270– 1527). It focuses on illustrated Early Solomonic manuscripts housed in public libraries in the United Kingdom. This is the first time that this body of illuminations has been comprehensively analysed. The resulting work sheds new light on the history of book illustration in Early Solomonic Ethiopia and provides insights into the connected histories of the Christian empire of the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands and the wider Mediterranean world. Moreover, it showcases the movements of manuscripts and the development of collections of Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Europe.

The discursive formation of British national identity: the lexical aspect

British national identity has been in the zone of constant study by scientists for a long period of time, but after Brexit, interest in this topic has increased significantly. The British nation, especially the part of it that was on the side of the Eurosceptics, after Brexit was aimed at strengthening the British identity and completely destroying any influence of globalization on the British nation. But despite the expectations of the British, many scientists agree that the national British identity is still in crisis. Thus, the object of this research is the culture-bound lexical elements of the English-language political discourse of online mass media, and the purpose is to identify the current state of British national identity through the analysis of the words-realities of the British political discourse. Current works (not older than five years) by Russian and foreign scientists in the fields of political discourse and national British identity form the methodological basis of the research. The analysis of the culture-bound lexical elements of English-language political discourse is carried out on the basis of online media texts for the period January–April 2024, which makes the study innovative and reflects the trends of modern linguistic science. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the national British identity is in a state of crisis. Brexit and subsequent events gave the British nation hope for the ascent of national identity and the return of its former imperial greatness, but analyzing the current articles of British online publications on political topics, it becomes evident that international processes still prevail over the British identity. The further perspective of the research lies in the field of studying the discursive formation of British identity from the point of view of syntactic, grammatical, and social aspects.

:The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media, and the British Public, 1932–53

:<i>The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media, and the British Public, 1932–53</i>

Black British love matters: Asserting the transformative power of love in Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold

ABSTRACT The genre of romance has until fairly recently predominantly depicted white protagonists and presented readers with limited representations of ethnic and racial diversity. This paper provides an overview of the ever-increasing number of Black British authors who are currently addressing this significant gap in the British publishing industry and analyse Bolu Babalola’s debut Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold (2020) as a case in point. Love in Colour is a collection of short stories which questions the universality of western tales of love and celebrates Black love and heritage. My contention is that Babalola’s collection, for its innovative elements, not only evinces that contemporary Black British women’s writing, characterized by aesthetic and formal innovations, continues to “test simple generic categories”, but, in its celebration of the transformative power of love, also demonstrates that Black love matters.

Cultural Clichés and the Cleo-Craze: How did Great Britain Use Propaganda Between 1882 and 1922 to Influence British Public Opinion to Support their Annexation of Egypt?

The contemporary relationship between British politicians, their press, and the British public is rooted in a propaganda model established in the 19th century, after advances in printing technology coincided with the expansion of the empire and subsequent justifications for imperialism. This article examines the founding of this relationship, specifically in the case of the official British annexation of Egypt between 1882 and 1922, in an attempt to illuminate more generally colonial power dynamics and how the media's portrayal of history alters a public's conceptions of race. Thus, the relationship between the Victorian press, the British government, and their annexed country Egypt, provides an important case analysis for propaganda studies generally, and furthers the discussion about how race and class are perceived by the British public as a result.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 in the Perception of the British Political Elite and British Public Opinion

The purpose of this papers is to analyze the perception of the British public opinion and the political elite of Great Britain of the revolutionary processes in Egypt during the period 1919—1922. The main thesis of this study is that the events in Egypt were on the periphery of British public discourse, but they caused a great concern among the British establishment. The perception of the Egyptians remained in the perspective of the ideas of the “white man’s burden” and the Egyptian nation was denied the right and possibility of self-determination and the creation of its own sovereign state. However, due to the impossibility of maintaining the pre-revolutionary status quo and the willingness of British society and elites to make some concessions to Egyptian leaders, Egypt gained independence while the British maintain the control over the Suez Canal and Sudan as well as the right to patronize Egyptian ethnic and confessional minorities and protect Egypt from external threats.

Structural and syntactic features of article titles about coronavirus

Over the past few years, articles regarding COVID-19 have remained pertinent in various media outlets, the internet and other communication platforms, which has ultimately resulted in the significance of the coronavirus topic not just in medical research, but also in the linguistic realm. Studying headlines of articles about coronavirus poses a challenge for researchers. The issue arises due to the significant role of journalism in influencing public opinion and the readership. Additionally, modern society's fascination with the coronavirus infection and the pandemic complicates the study further. The importance of this study is due to the newness of the subject matter, with limited coverage in scientific literature. The aim of this article is to examine the structural and semantic characteristics of article headings relating to the coronavirus. To achieve this goal, several tasks need to be accomplished. Firstly, it is necessary to identify and analyse the characteristics of the headline as part of the journalistic text, its various types and functions, and its consistency with the content of the article. Secondly, a study must be conducted on the structural and semantic features of the coronavirus-related article headlines. This includes determining the frequency of usage of different structural patterns of simple and complex sentences in both British and Russian publications, and examining the impact of these patterns on the readers' perception of the article's content. According to the research, it was concluded that the title of a publication serves a dual purpose as an independent unit and an essential component of the text. The title has various functions, including graphic-excretory, informative, nominative, and advertising-expressive. It is characterised by its brevity, nominativeness, and written fixity which contribute to its effectiveness.

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field.

Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.

The Making of a Shakespeare Critic: Partial English Translations of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in the Long Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT Wilhelm’s reflections in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1794/95) significantly influenced the history of Hamlet criticism. The belief that Goethe used his protagonist to present his own analyses was both reflected in and reinforced by partial English translations of the German novel that appeared in British periodicals and anthologies throughout the long nineteenth century. Due to their usefulness for critical discussions, and for British publishers targeting new audiences, Wilhelm’s disquisitions were repeatedly extracted, adapted and remediated by translators and editors who exploited Goethe’s shifting reputation in nineteenth-century Britain. At their hands, pieces of fictional dialogue were reconfigured into autonomous pieces of critical commentary that served specific agendas in the target culture. Building on recent work on remediation, this article analyses both how parts of the novel underwent changes on the textual, paratextual, material and contextual levels, and why translations made them cross the fluid boundary between fiction and literary criticism.

Russian Nihilists in British Periodicals, 1880–1900

Abstract The late-nineteenth-century Russian nihilist movement was popularized by the portrait of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But despite Turgenev’s nuanced and poignant portrayal, nihilism became associated with Russian revolutionary activities and especially terrorism. Discussions of the nihilist ethos were not limited to Russia but pervaded print culture in Western Europe. The orientalizing rhetoric of British journalism placed Russia firmly in the Eastern camp, so that it offered both the spectacle of exotic, retrograde monarchy and the equally fascinating or threatening vision of revolution in Europe. Revolutionary activities in Russia became part of the “dynamite theme” in British fiction of the fin de siècle, when terrorism also accompanied anarchist movements in continental Europe and Fenian bombings in support of Irish independence. Additionally, Russians became part of the London population through the immigration of Jews, a movement that increased significantly after around 1880. Russian dissidents themselves were welcomed in Britain after the Extradition Act of 1870. This article surveys a range of periodical writings, both reportage and fiction, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Periodical articles and stories reflect the pervasiveness and varied presentation of Russian revolutionary movements and ideas in late Victorian British publications.

Mapping British Public Monuments Related to Slavery

ABSTRACT This article is a product of the first complete survey of British public representational monuments in the U.K. related to transatlantic slavery, available online at https://www.britishmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net. Identifying over 900 monuments, it brings this survey to bear on current public and policy debates about such monuments’ history, significance and meaning vis-à-vis slavery, art and heritage. Examining the monuments at scale, we identify the monuments’ patterns of production and provide data-led answers to specific questions such as what Britain’s most significant monumental legacies of slavery are; how enslaved people appear in British public monuments; and how this data might support rethinking these monuments.

Problems of the initial stage of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) on the pages of the British press

The subject of the study is the reflection of the problems of the initial stage (1945-1947) of the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949 in the publications of the British media on the example of the central British publications: the Daily Herald (a newspaper that supported the Labour Party), The Times and The Daily Mirror (a supporter of the British Labour Party) and the Yorkshire Observer (a British publication of liberal views). The questions raised are considered in a problem-chronological plan. The article analyzes the topics of articles and problems on Greece raised by these publications, their attitude to the events in this country and the conflicting parties, the depth of coverage of the topic. The main conclusions of the research conducted for the first time in Russian science are that in the British press, in the face of selected publications, when covering issues of the Greek internal political conflict, objectivity and impartiality were not present in all cases. Sometimes the ascertaining side prevailed over the analytical one. In some cases, publications ignored the most important issues for Greece at that time. The reflection of the international aspects of the Greek war in the context of the "cold war" ("promotion" of anti-communist, anti-Soviet motives) was traced. The research materials can be used for further study of the Greek Civil War of 1946-1946, the propaganda aspect of the Cold War and regional conflicts of the postwar period.

Novels and the NSTC: A Quantitative Study of Legal Deposit

ABSTRACTThe Nineteenth‐Century Short Title Catalog (NSTC) attempts to provide comprehensive coverage of the print record in the English‐speaking world from 1801 to 1918 based primarily on the catalog records of Britain's five legal deposit libraries during the 19th century. Previous studies have used the NSTC to quantitatively study broad trends in Victorian‐era British publishing, but they have not sufficiently acknowledged the NSTC's limitations. This study works within the NSTC's limitations by using it to quantitatively study the phenomena of legal deposit. Analysis of two, 90‐volume random samples of first edition English novels reveals the impact of changing library acquisition practices and legal deposit legislation on the comprehensiveness of Britain's legal deposit libraries, as well as the NSTC's comprehensiveness and how it can be utilized for quantitative book history despite its deficiencies.

ЛИЧНОСТЬ ГЕНЕРАЛА А.Н. КУРОПАТКИНА НА СТРАНИЦАХ БРИТАНСКОЙ ПРЕССЫ В ГОДЫ РУССКО-ЯПОНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ (1904-1905)

The article analyzes the process of formation of the image of the commander-in-chief of the Russian army in Manchuria General A.N. Kuropatkin in the British public during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 - 1905 on the example of periodicals of Great Britain and its colonies. The study of this problematic touches socio-cultural aspects of the perception of the "other" and the issues of military-political and strategic nature, because A.N. Kuropatkin, who held the post of Minister of War of the Russian Empire in 1898 - 1904, determined the contours of the Russian military policy, which solved the problem of defending Russian interests in Central Asia and the Far East and countering British aspirations in these regions. The construction of a certain image of General Kuropatkin in the British press followed both the propagandistic purpose of manipulating public opinion and foreign policy goal, aimed at strengthening British influence in Persia and Afghanistan. In the course of this study, materials from periodicals of Great Britain and its colonies, as well as unpublished documents from Russian and British archives were used. The study concludes that during the Russo-Japanese War the image of General A.N. Kuropatkin underwent a transformation from a "great warrior" to a "bogeyman". Such a spread in the assessments of the personality of the Russian commander on the pages of British publications retained a single semantic field, within which General A.N. Kuropatkin represented the personification of the "Russian threat to India."