Patriotic Message Research Articles

Signs of the country in the poems of Qubadi Jalizadeh, an example of the poetry of the martyr walks alone, the gardens of Melek Taus

The subject of our research is how to refer to the national theme in qubadi Jalizadeh's poems. We have tried to express patriotic thoughts and intentions in all its dimensions within our discussion, as well as in detail the signs by which the poet expresses his mentally distressed feelings for his country. One of the most important points we have reached is that the poet has spoken the most beautiful poem for his country, with a warm and passionate passion, which was a high imagination, a creative thought, an emotion, and a poetic imagination, the family of his simple words, simple expressions, which always carried a national and patriotic message.

Young people's attitudes towards films about the Great Patriotic War: viewing expectations and genre preferences

The article presents the results of two author's researches of young people's attitude towards films about the Great Patriotic War: "History in cinema: the problems of remediation" (10 focus groups) and "The Memory of the War in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinematography: the Young Audience View" (questionnaire survey, n = 2003).The authors identified the main narratives of interest to young audiences. It was noted that the films popular among young people are multi-genre works which combine historical accuracy and autobiographical, melodramatic and action-film elements.The viewing motivation associated with watching films about the Great Patriotic War, analyzed in terms of the theory of usage and satisfaction, is a complex system of expectations. The authors distinguish 6 groups of normative expectations: identity and integration; establishment of pleasant environment and recognition; tension and sensation seeking; authenticity and cognitive satisfaction; escapism and imagination; surprise and spectacularity.Historical war films fulfil social functions (meeting young people's expectations of integration, establishing a pleasant environment and credibility), while being an entertaining media product appropriate to the youth mediahabitus (meeting expectations of spectacle, suspense and escapism). The authors state that historical films devoted to the events of the Great Patriotic War manage to successfully maintain a balance between format (proximity in terms of style and language to the youth audience) and content (ideological, patriotic message).

Inspired to mask up: The effect of uplifting media messages on attitudes about wearing face masks among Democrats and Republicans.

Although mask-wearing can curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and protect others, the attitudes and behaviors regarding wearing a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic appear to differ between partisan groups. This study aimed to investigate whether wearing a mask in public can be elicited by uplifting media messages through increasing universal orientation and prosocial motivation. In addition, we tested whether uplifting videos focusing on patriotic American values (e.g., the flag, military) moderated partisan differences related to both feelings of inspiration and an individual's attitudes and behavioral intentions regarding mask-wearing. Participants (N = 446) were exposed to an uplifting video devoid of patriotic messages, an uplifting video featuring patriotic messages, or a control video. Results showed that both Democrats and Republicans found both uplifting videos inspiring, leading to greater universal orientations and prosocial motivations. Universal orientations were associated with more favorable attitudes and behavioral intentions regarding mask use among Republicans, and prosocial motivations lead to more favorable attitudes among members of both parties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) Impact Statement An online experiment examined if uplifting videos that did or did not feature patriotic themes would lead to more favorable attitudes about wearing masks to curtail the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic among Democrats and Republicans. The results showed that both types of uplifting videos led to heightened feelings of connectedness with others and with prosocial motivations. These responses, in turn, were associated with more favorable attitudes about wearing masks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

A study about the advertisements and pictorial posters of WWI and WWII

In this paper, we have tried to evoke the propaganda episode in the First and the Second World Wars (WWI and WWII). It is a small part of our study including only research about images, characters, messages and words (title and text) used to create a mobilising movement of the people during these wars. The purpose was to select elements from the advertisements and pictorial posters and to comment upon the impact of the graphic messages included. During our work, we have identified many interesting things which had the target to mobilise one person against another using graphics and words with a strong patriotic message. This paper presents the interpretation for only a few posters and advertisements (about 48), but relevant for war propaganda.
 
 Keywords: WWI, WWII, propaganda, war, symbols, image, words

A study about the advertisements and pictorial posters of WWI and WWII

In this paper, we have tried to evoke the propaganda episode in the First and the Second World Wars (WWI and WWII). It is a small part of our study including only research about images, characters, messages and words (title and text) used to create a mobilising movement of the people during these wars. The purpose was to select elements from the advertisements and pictorial posters and to comment upon the impact of the graphic messages included. During our work, we have identified many interesting things which had the target to mobilise one person against another using graphics and words with a strong patriotic message. This paper presents the interpretation for only a few posters and advertisements (about 48), but relevant for war propaganda.
 
 Keywords: WWI, WWII, propaganda, war, symbols, image, words

СЪХРАНЯВАНЕ НА БЪЛГАРСКОТО САМОСЪЗНАНИЕ ЧРЕЗ ПАТРИОТИЧНИ ПОСЛАНИЯ В ПЪРВИТЕ УЧЕБНИЦИ ПО ЛИТЕРАТУРА (НА ПРИМЕРА НА „СВЕТУЛКА“)

The state policy towards the Bulgarians abroad is related to the preservation of the Bulgarian ethnocultural space abroad and the national, cultural and spiritual identity of all Bulgarian citizens around the world, by preserving the ethnocultural identity of the Bulgarians and the Bulgarian communities abroad. To achieve this goal, it is necessary, children that living abroad systematically get acquainted with literary works that help preserve the national identity, way of life and culture. This report examines the reception of literary works with patriotic messages in the first grade on the example of „Svetulka“ – a literature textbooks for descendants of Bessarabian Bulgarians living in Moldova.

Nasha Istoriia: The Russian Revolutions, the State, School Textbooks and Public Celebrations Under Putin

Russia’s state and society are still coming to terms with the legacy of 1917. An underlying fear of revolutions exists due to their perceived chaos and instability. The centenary coincided with revisions of national history education under the presidencies of Vladimir Putin. These revisions are designed to project an image of a united country and strong sovereign state under the banner of patriotism. The 1917 revolutions represent a disruption in Russia’s history and undermine the patriotic message in these new narratives. This article assesses the treatment of the 1917 revolutions in contemporary Russia via two media; school textbooks and public celebrations. Revisions of the national history must legitimize the state and its goals. Textbooks and commemorations are media that reflect the preferred images of the past to promote national unity, historical continuity and discourage domestic discords. Both media show the complexity in retelling the narrative of 1917. Whilst modern school history textbooks paint the revolutions somewhat negatively, few official commemorations took place in 2017. Those that did were kept at arm’s length and lacked a narrative. With seemingly nothing to gain from this part of history, meaningful assessments of 1917 have been left to schoolteachers or postponed altogether.

Hungary in the Great War and Total Propaganda. Review of: Bertényi, Ifj. I., Boka, L., & Katona, A. (Eds.). (2016). Propaganda: politika, hétköznapi és magas kultúra, művészet és média a nagy háborúban [Propaganda: Politics, Everyday Life and High Culture, Arts and Media in the Great War]. Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár. 542 p., ill.

In many countries of Europe, the years between 2014 to 2016 marked the 100 th anniversary of World War I also known as the Great War. Hungary is one of the states which suffered catastrophic losses in this global military conflict. It joined the war as an equal part of a big composite monarchy and eventually, in accordance with the peace treaties signed in 1920 in Versailles, lost two thirds of its territory, turned into a virtually monoethnic state and found itself surrounded by hostile powers. In this regard, it is clear why the Great War is of considerable importance for the contemporary humanities and Hungarian society. Recently, dozens of exhibitions and scholarly conferences have been organised all over the country. This article considers the proceedings of a representative interdisciplinary forum where Hungarian historians, literary historians, and art historians examined the phenomenon of propaganda, formulated the task taxonomising its forms, or mechanisms of influencing the population, control over the written press and media, formation of public opinion, intellectuals’ attitude to the war and studying of the propaganda message of material objects — from monuments in public spaces to utensils and souvenirs. The authors of the work reviewed come to the conclusion that if war and propaganda have been interconnected since the wars of religion of the early modern period, the total war which erased the division line between the front and the rear, and total propaganda, which turned texts, images, visual, and material objects surrounding people in their everyday life into patriotic messages, first appear in their full form in the early twentieth century. It seems that the conclusion most of the authors come to is that the memory of the Great War was replaced by the trauma after the collapse of the multinational empire, and historians in their case studies and comprehensive works have to measure the extent to which propaganda influenced mass and individual consciousness of the Great War generation.

«Escritores a la moderna»: <em>Los liberales o los filósofos del día, sin máscara y sin rebozo. Comedia joco-seria en un acto</em> (1811), o decálogo del mal patriota

El 10 de noviembre de 1810, casi siete semanas después de que tuviera lugar la primera sesión de las Cortes de Cádiz, se firmaba el decreto que promulgaba la libertad de imprenta. Este acontecimiento permitió la salida de múltiples impresos y periódicos que vinieron a recrudecer la contienda ideológica entre liberales y absolutistas. Fueron muchos los que usaron estructuras que acercaban la crítica a la ficción literaria, con un contenido en clara evolución desde el mensaje patriótico hacia la invectiva política. En este proceso se incluye la pieza teatral “Los liberales o los filósofos del día, sin máscara y sin rebozo”, publicada en Cádiz en 1811. En ella varios personajes, liderados por el Diablo Cojuelo, deciden trabajar como escritores «a la moderna». Para este fin siguen varias reglas basadas en la repetición de voces embaucadoras, los ataques al gremio eclesiástico, las injurias contra el Santo Oficio y el corporativismo ante la sátira enemiga. Censinato Vigornia, representante de la grey servil, critica con sus intervenciones cada argumento enemigo, en un intento de reforzar el verdadero patriotismo y desprestigiar la línea de pensamiento liberal.

Lady Morgan in Italy: A Traveller with an Agenda

Lady Morgan (nee Sydney Owenson) was a professional Irish traveller and travel-writer, who spent over a year on the peninsula. The travelogue Italy (1821) she was commissioned to write on the basis of the reputation she had acquired as a novelist (e.g. The Wild Irish Girl , 1806) and a socio-political writer ( France , 1817), left a mark on Italy and on the understanding of Italy in Great Britain. Her writings, in fact, helped disseminate the ideal of a unified Italy and influence British and Irish public opinion in favour of Italy’s aspirations to cast off foreign or domestic autocratic rule. Moreover, she used her travelogue to serve the cause of Ireland disguising a patriotic message about her home country under her many sallies about nationalism and the right to self-determination concerning Italy. The political impact of her book, unusual for a travel account written by a woman, was enhanced by Morgan’s radical ideology, the gender bias of her observations and her original methods. The present article purposes to examine Morgan’s double, feminine and masculine, approach of mixing solid documentation with apparently frivolous notes originating in the feminine domain of society news, commentary on the domestic scene and emotional reporting on social and historical events. Distrusting male-authored official history, Morgan gave a central place in her work to the informal sources from which she gathered her insights about Italy. Analysing how she came to obtain the contemporary input for elaborating her ideas will be the aim of this chapter which will dwell on the more worldly aspects of Morgan’s sojourn in the peninsula focussing on the company she kept, the activities she partook of, the events of a domestic nature she witnessed.

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union April Holm (bio) Timothy L. Wesley. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Just as Abraham Lincoln famously asserted that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the Civil War, historians of nineteenth-century American religion have reached a consensus that religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism, is somehow essential to a complete understanding of the conflict. The exact mechanism of that “somehow,” however, remains difficult to define. Over the past twenty years, historians have taken on the challenge of formulating a satisfying and complete account of the connection between the pervasive religiosity of the nineteenth-century United States and the great political and military upheaval of the era. Historians agree upon the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to nineteenth-century American culture.1 Americans North and South interpreted the traumas of war and its aftermath through this evangelical Protestant lens. The Civil War era saw a religious people using their faith to make sense of an all-consuming military, political, and interpersonal struggle. As George Rable writes in his recent synthesis, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, “many people on both sides of the conflict turned to religious faith to help explain the war’s causes, course, and consequences.”2 Both Northerners and Southerners, Rable argues, saw Providence at work in the drama of secession, the ordeals of the battlefield, and the revolution of emancipation. Still, many questions about the war and religion remain unresolved. Historians of religion and the Civil War grapple with two categories of questions. One category seeks to identify the role religion played in the war itself, from secession to emancipation: did religion affect secular events? A second line of inquiry asks how the war affected American religion: did secular events fundamentally alter the American relationship with the divine? A subset of this latter line of inquiry concerns how the war affected the lives of people of faith—specifically clergy, active church members, and the denominations to [End Page 655] which they belonged. Timothy Wesley takes up these problems in his thought-provoking and ambitious volume, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Wesley begins with the observation that antebellum clergy could influence millions. Preachers, he writes, were “the most politically determinative force within affiliated American Christianity, the only members of the greater church family who exercised significant yet immediate authority over others” (p. 42). Patriotic civilians, church leadership, and secular authorities recognized this powerful potential influence. Consequently, ministers acquired heightened political significance during the Civil War. Observers from all three groups monitored clergy to ensure loyalty to the Union. They expected and enforced patriotic messages from the pulpit. Wesley argues that the narrative of a monolithically pro-war and pro-Union Northern clergy has obscured the number of ministers in the North who strongly opposed such “political preaching.” Supporting his argument with evidence from church records, religious periodicals, and military documents, Wesley draws three conclusions: that white Northern ministers did not uniformly support the government; that, nevertheless, the boundary between church and state was much more porous in the Civil War era than historians currently assume it was; and finally, that the censure of nonpolitical preachers constitutes an important untold part of the story of civil liberties in the era. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of work on religion during the crisis of the union. Wesley draws attention to an overlooked point of conflict between religion, politics, and church and state in American history. His work prompts instructive new ways of thinking about civil liberties, loyalty, and the divide between the moral and the political in the fraught atmosphere of the Civil War North. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War is structured both chronologically and thematically. Wesley begins with a discussion of the familiar political events of the 1850s and concludes with the end of the Civil War. The first two-thirds of the volume primarily concern white Northern clergy and their struggles over religion and politics in the time of war. Wesley admirably includes clergy from outside the evangelical Protestant mainstream...

아이덴티티 융합(Identity Fusion)이 애국적 소비에 미치는 영향 : 한국과 미국 소비자 비교연구

This study proposes that there is a significant relationship between identity fusion with a country and patriotic consumption behaviors, and individuals’ cultural backgrounds play an important role in this relationship. To test this idea, this study focuses on fused persons and explored how these persons reacted to advertising that contained patriotic messages. Further, to uncover possible cross-cultural differences in individuals responding to those patriotic ad messages depending on their fusion level, this study explores and compares people from two different cultural contexts; Korea vs. the United States. The results demonstrated that fused persons in both countries increased their willingness to be patriotic consumers by showing a high consumer ethnocentric tendency and favorable responses to patriotic advertising while such influences of identity fusion on patriotic consumption behaviors are stronger in the collectivistic country (i.e., Korea) than in the individualistic country (i.e., the U.S.). Additionally, the findings of study suggest that fusion can be a more influential factor to predict consumers’ patriotic consumption behaviors than identification.

“A Priceless Book to Have out Here”: Soldiers Reading Shakespeare in the First World War

The links between the 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary and the global conflict with which it coincided have been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. Recent work has examined the cultural, political, and military contexts of commemoration events and shown how Shakespeare as cultural symbol was mobilized for war. No systematic work has yet been done, however, on the most basic level of Shakespeare's cultural mobilization: the individual act of reading Shakespeare in the context of wartime. Utilising the methodologies of the new “history of reading”, this article examines the place of Shakespeare's texts in the reading lives of British and Commonwealth soldiers. Drawing upon contemporary letters and diaries, it demonstrates that there are several distinct types of Shakespearean reading practice recoverable from the archives. “Compliant” readers strove to recover conventionally patriotic messages from Shakespeare's texts. “Nostalgic” readers used Shakespeare as a form of escapism or a way of asserting a civilian identity separate from military service. Direct evidence for the reading habits of ordinary soldiers is more difficult to recover from the archives than those of officers. Nevertheless, scattered references to Shakespearean texts in the diaries and correspondence of ordinary-ranking soldiers show that Shakespeare could also function as a symbol of cultural literacy for working-class autodidacts at war.

Arthurian animation: a study of cartoon Camelots on film and television

MICHAEL N. SALDA, Arthurian Animation: A Study of Cartoon Camelots on Film and Television. Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland & Company, 2013. Pp. 210. isbn: 978-0-7864-4. $45.Cinema Arthuriana has, in the wake of Kevin J. Harty's pioneering work, become a flourishing research area, within which Michael N. Salda has established himself over the last decade as the leading authority on Arthurian cartoons. With the present volume, he has now produced the definitive account of the genre.Arthurian Animation is clearly a labor of love, and written in a pleasantly witty jargon-free style, but Saida's scholarship is deep, and wide-ranging. While his initial approach is historical and factual, with full details of creators, companies, dates, and plot summaries, he also provides critical evaluations. His book is mainly concerned with cartoons in the United States, but includes, too, material from Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Russia, China, Japan, and Australia.Arthurianimation (to use Saida's phrase) began in 1933 with Bosco's Knight-Mare, a short cartoon that has foint Arthurian allusions, and was probably prompted by the release of Warner's^ Connecticut Yankee (1933). A for more ambitious feature-length cartoon, King Arthur's Knights, was projected in the early 1940s by Hugh Harman, its quasi-Malorian martial ethos promoting a timely patriotic message. Sadly, this was never produced, but Saida supplies a close analysis of the evolving storyline and reproduces five character drawings that he deduces were done by Robert Stokes.When post-war film makers launched more 'historical' subjects, animators followed suit with a host of short cartoons, incorporating even Popeye, Bugs Bunny, and Huckleberry Hound within comic Arthurian settings. The Broadway success of Camelot then inspired Disney to create a long awaited full-length Arthurian cartoon, The Sword in the Stone (1963), but this proved to be a sanitized version that earned only moderate commercial and critical success. During the next decade a mass of shorter works appeared, but Arthurian legend received only frivolous attention therein, such as a section of Dasy Duck & Porky Pig Meet the Groovy Goolies (1972), which Saida concedes 'is painful to watch' (75).Despite the proliferation of major Arthurian features between 1975 {Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and 1981 {Excalibur), their improved quality was mirrored only fleetingly in cartoons, with the honorable exception of the Japanese anime series King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1981), a thirty-part TV serialization that strove to impose coherence on diverse Arthurian traditions. …

“Appropriate in a Sylvan State”

This article demonstrates that William Rush’s unusual, terracotta Self-Portrait (ca. 1822)—in which the artist’s stern head rises from the knotty trunk of a white pine tree—illuminates an increasingly fraught and mediated corporeal relationship to the American environment during the early national period, as the recognition of scarcity and extinction challenged earlier beliefs in the plentitude of nature. Through subtle allusions to the classical past, Rush’s Self-Portrait projected a patriotic message of empire and victory grounded in the natural world. Even as Self-Portrait upheld Enlightenment and imperial ideals about cultivation and domestication of the American landscape, it celebrated the vibrant materiality of wood and provided a visual memorial to the region’s diminishing sylvan past.

Nikolai Erdman and the poetics of children's film scripts

ABSTRACTNikolai Erdman is mainly known as the author of two remarkable plays: Mandat/The Warrant (1925) and Samoubiitsa/The Suicide (1928), although he also wrote numerous sketches for the variety theatre and the circus, as well as film scripts, which constitute the bulk of Erdman's literary output. Among these film scripts there are a range of children's film dramas, an area in which he made numerous discoveries of historical significance. With his co-author Mikhail Vol'pin, Erdman wrote the script for Aleksandr Rou's fairy-tale film Morozko (1964); subsequently he developed a new direction of fantastic cinema, which may be called — to use Evgenii Shvarts's expression — the poetics of ‘an ordinary miracle’. Soviet cinema during wartime and the 1950s was dominated by the aesthetics of the trick, where the fantastic atmosphere was created through new technological means; later, technical miracles no longer captivated audiences. Morozko contains many miracles, but they do not consist of tricks and magic — as was the case in previous Russian fairy-tale films; instead, the spectator's attention is held by the world of ordinary and, at the same time, ridiculous characters: the Soviet fairy-tale film adhered to the laws of comedy. Erdman and Vol'pin consistently rejected the traditions of Russian fairy-tale films, with the staging of tricks and the use of masks as heroes, as well as patriotic messages declaimed from the screen. At the same time, the scriptwriters introduced innovative principles to the fairy-tale film, which had been alien or peripheral to the genre: they created psychologically authentic characters who, on the one hand, were portrayed according to the principles of the lyrical comedy: from a comic point of view; on the other hand, they were involved in situations that are not at all comedic, but tragic. Erdman and Vol'pin thus adapted the genre of tragicomedy of The Warrant and The Suicide for the fairy-tale film.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

This paper analyses the discursive struggle engendered by the widespread revival of the occult in America during the Second World War. It begins by analysing middlebrow press reports, which used this interest in the occult to spread patriotic messages whilst simultaneously dismissing it as a symptom of women's wartime anxieties. The paper moves on to argue that this complex engagement with ‘popular occultism’ also manifested in ‘escapist’ forms such as literature, radio and cinema. It focuses particularly on a cycle of ‘serious’ ghost films which—like the Ouija board—provided a medium that addressed women's feelings of uncertainty and loss, whilst drawing attention away from the violent eradication of bodies. However, analysis of the production and reception of Paramount's The Uninvited —‘the first serious story of spirit influence’—highlights counter-hegemonic strategies within these films, evinced by complaints to the studio and industry regulator over The Uninvited's ‘dangerous’ influences on women.

The Effect of Patriotic Messages on Restaurant Tipping1

This study compared the effectiveness of 2 types of patriotic messages with a warmth/ ingratiation message and a control condition on restaurant tipping. Two female food servers waited on 100 parties eating dinner. When diners were finished with their meals, servers left them 1 of 4 messages on their checks: “Have a Nice Day,”“God Bless America,”“United We Stand,” or no message. Results indicated that parties who received the “United We Stand” message left significantly higher tips than did those receiving no message or the “Have a Nice Day” message. No other significant differences were found. These results and their implications are discussed.

Literary Piracy, Nationalism, and Women Readers in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1850-1855

During the early nineteenth century, most books sold in the United States were foreign imports or copies. At an 1834 book trade sale, for example, of the 114 fiction books printed in America, 95 were English reprints.1 A reliance on British literature was facilitated by the lack of an international copyright law and what Laurel Brake has called "a vestigial, high cultural value attached to the ejected imperial power."2 However, America's nascent publishing industry was also shaped by what Meredith McGill calls a "Jacksonian resistance to centralized development" that kept the nation's book production system dispersed.3 This decentralization compounded and reinforced the young nation's lack of a strong literary identity and led to its reliance on imports from Great Britain for literary sustenance. British novels easily filled the bill for this decentralized system of publishers who struggled to survive by printing what was well-known and had a ready audience of consumers. American magazines were no exception: they took the culture of reprinting even further by adapting a wide variety of British publications for their own purposes. Despite a growing sense of literary nationalism, McGill contends that reprinting was the cultural norm for most of the century and was even considered to be proof of an enlightened democracy because it produced affordable reading materials for the general public and avoided monopolistic publishing practices. In fact, opponents of an international copyright agreement defined the manufacturing and dissemination of texts as America's primary cultural role, not the creation of original literature.4 Harper's New Monthly Magazine is the quintessential example of a literary endeavor that sought to adapt British literature to the establishment of a healthy and egalitarian publishing empire in the United States.5 While Harper's mimicked the survival techniques used by [End Page 63] many American publishing houses in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its preoccupation with creating a national literary identity out of "pirated" scraps of British periodicals signals a transition from national dependence on British culture to a more patriotic devotion to elevating the status of American literature during the 1850s.6 In this essay, I examine how Harper's repackaged and redeployed British literature for a nationalistic purpose, thereby participating in the nation's transformation from a culture of reprinting to a culture of authorial originality and nationality.7 Through what seems an unlikely appeal for a publication famous for its literary piracy, Harper's editors forged a patriotic message addressed primarily to women readers. While the magazine valued British novelists such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray over American writers, its focus on British authors was rhetorically constructed as nationalistic. The editors theorized that by providing the public with these examples of "excellent" high cultural texts, the magazine would raise the standards of American readers and, in turn, raise the quality of American literature. In this way, Harper's urged its women readers to nurture the next generation of native readers with the British literary models it provided so that they would eventually have the skills to both recognize and create a distinctly tasteful American literary culture. In order to understand how Harper's was able to build a patriotic message despite its reputation for piracy, it is necessary to determine how it became the most successful magazine in America between 1850 and 1855.8 Published at the beginning of the American industrial age, Harper's was produced at one of the country's first steam-powered presses located at Harper and Brothers headquarters in New York. The magazine rose to prominence due, in part, to its effective use of technology to create some of the earliest electroplate images in the nation. The magazine's editorial staff also brought status to the endeavor. From 1850 to 1856...

1939-40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism

Virginia Woolf in her last novel, Between the Acts, explores fascism from the vantage of the new physics and of information technology. Her knowledge of the new physics is attested to by myriad diary entries; her knowledge of information technology was largely intuitive. In Between the Acts, she uses a gramophone to brew patriotic emotion and thus to transform a group of British pageant goers into a herd. Ultimately, however, she short-circuits the herd impulse by privileging the audience members' interpretative acts. In the novel, patriotic messages of authority are deliberately adulterated by the gramophone's static or noise. The audience members must therefore make meaning out of noise; these interpretative acts break their visceral connection to the sound waves, the rhythm and rhyme, of patriotism. Woolf's intuitive grasp of the concept of noise inherent in information technology allows her to articulate an antiauthoritarian pluralist politics.