Popular Print Culture Research Articles

Paper Dolls

This article addresses the striking resemblance of a late nineteenth-century obstetrical simulator to contemporary commercial paper dolls. This period is often characterised in histories of medicine as one of increasing institutionalisation and professionalisation of childbirth through hospital training and state regulation. But this narrative is only part of the story. It marginalises the perspective of patients and midwives, and those outside of the geographic ‘West’, and it silences aspects of medical culture: social and caring relationships, emotion, play, and humour. While these aspects of medical history are less well represented in textual sources, material objects like Shibata Kōichi’s ‘Obstetrical Pocket-Phantoms’ can help to give a fuller picture. Beginning by situating Shibata’s phantoms in the conventional histories of obstetric training and the intermedial spaces of the clinic and lecture theatre, I then ask how the phantoms might have been used and understood differently outside of these spaces. Using Robin Bernstein’s concept of ‘scriptive things’, I employ a visual and material study of the objects, informed by the wider cultural contexts of dolls and popular print culture in Germany, the USA and Japan, to argue for a history of Shibata’s phantoms as paper dolls that encouraged many forms of play: from learning and explorative, to mothering and caring, to humorous and subversive. By acknowledging that Shibata’s phantoms would also have been recognised as paper dolls, I present a history that centres unrecorded aspects of, and under-studied agents in, medical culture.

‘Here she comes by God! ram away Doctor if one Bolus won’t do put in three’ – the Queen Caroline affair in satirical prints

ABSTRACT The present essay examines a sample of satirical prints and broadsides illustrating the main stages of the Queen Caroline affair (QCA). It claims that caricaturists and satirists used the vocabularies of melodrama and farce to transform a divorce scandal into an innovative political and cultural intervention in the public sphere. These popular literary and sub-literary traditions interwove the personal and the political elements of the case and created an innovative political language within a new print culture. This new print culture combined elements of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature and culture thereby challenging cultural hegemony. Against the backdrop of the political protest that followed the end of the Wars in 1815, the satirical representation of the QCA questioned cultural stratification and gloried exploiting ‘unrespectability’ towards those in power. It was the triumph of laughter. Albeit for a brief period, this type of popular print culture undermined the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling class and became the most innovative attempt to build a more inclusive public sphere in the early nineteenth century.

Unani Dawakhanas and Reimagining the Idea of Health vis-a-vis Popular Print Culture in Urdu in Mid-twentieth Century North India

Unani Dawakhanas and Reimagining the Idea of Health vis-a-vis Popular Print Culture in Urdu in Mid-twentieth Century North India

Living ‘La High Life’: Images, Objects, and Words in Motion in Spain and Beyond

From around 1880 to 1920, the term ‘high life’ figured prominently in the press, advertising, literature, and illustrated print media in European and American urban centres and was linked to luxury consumer products and a wealthy lifestyle. The meanings of the expression were flexible and became intertwined across geographic locations. Printed media acted as a non-physical contact zone where a multitude of cultural influences, economic interests, and visual languages intersected. Taking Spanish popular print culture as a point of departure, this article charts how the term emerged in different geographic locations and became associated with both local and international identities. The circulation of the high life brand name reveals how cultural producers, advertisers, and local readers thought about transnational webs of consumerism at the turn of the twentieth century. The expression was decentred from its English origin, even in Anglophone settings, and redefined across local cultures without losing its association with perceived international practices and trends.

Short-Lived Play

Media history is still written largely from national perspectives so that the role of import and export, translations and franchises is seldom foregrounded. On geographically and linguistically limited markets, imported materials have nevertheless been crucial parts of popular print culture. This paper explores the market of ‘sex edutainment’ magazines in 1970s Finland, zooming specifically in on Leikki (‘Play’, 1976), a sex magazine for women translated from the Norwegian Lek (first launched in 1971) that provided knowledge on topics ranging from marriage to masturbation and lesbian desire. Through contextual analysis of Leikki, a marginal publication that has basically faded from popular memory, this article attends to ephemeral and even failed print media in order to account for the heterogeneity of the 1970s sex press market as it intermeshed with sex advice and education. In so doing, it adds new perspectives to a field largely focused on successful periodicals and addresses knowledge gaps resulting from the exclusion of the sex press from mainstream media historiography.

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Pirates and Publicity: The Making and Unmaking of Early Modern Pirates in English and Scottish Popular Print

This essay contrasts scholarship on printed authority within buccaneer ethnographies, contemporary apologetics for colonial enterprise, and the role of publicity in the delineation of piracy within print to ask: ‘when is a pirate not a pirate?’. Beginning with the ethnographies relating to the buccaneers’ crossing of the Isthmus of Darien during the ‘Pacific Adventure’ (1679–1682), this paper describes how the buccaneers escaped prosecution through their literary materials and became socially rehabilitated as credible explorers. Drawing on materials which highlight the diverse readings of piracy within the different ‘news-cultures’ and maritime traditions which existed in the Atlantic archipelago, this paper develops an argument for a ‘popular’ conception and interpretation of piracy within publicity and periodical print which reflects its utility within competing political and maritime enterprises. Using contrasting examples of the negotiation and renegotiation of what constituted ‘piracy’ within the promotion of the attempted colonisation of the Isthmus of Darien by the Company of Scotland (1696–1700), and the literary campaign which surrounded the trial of the crew of the Worcester for piracy in 1705, this essay argues for the role of ‘public opinion’ and popular print culture in the making and unmaking of pirates in early modern anglophone print.

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Sarcino Zboray

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Sarcino Zboray Jennifer Putzi (bio) The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ronald j. zboray and mary sarcino zboray, eds. Oxford University Press, 2019 736 pp. US Popular Print Culture to 1860, a remarkable collection of forty essays, demonstrates the breadth of the field of print culture studies in the United States and points toward its future potential for literary scholars, historians, and other scholars of the early and antebellum periods. Those of us who have relied on the first three volumes of the earlier History of the Book in America (published by UNCP in 2007published by UNCP in 2010, and 2007, respectively) will find Zboray and Zboray’s volume similarly invaluable in our own research and teaching. Brilliantly edited, clearly organized, and responsive to recent trends in the field, broadly defined, US Popular Print Culture to 1860 represents a significant achievement for Zboray and Zboray, as well as for those scholars who contributed to it. This volume is the fifth in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture series. (The only others published so far are volume 1, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, and volume 6, US Popular Print Culture, 1860– 1920.) Series editor Gary Kelly outlines the questions driving the editors of the individual volumes in this way: “What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers’ lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time?” (unpaginated introduction). As in all of their work about print culture in the antebellum United States, Zboray and Zboray respond to these questions with a keen sense of history and social justice, emphasizing the diffusion of print throughout early America and the variety of people encountering it. They accordingly eschew the term history of the book, which seems to them to be “too top-down, value-laden, object-centered, supply-sided, processual, and restrictive,” for “a history of popular print culture, which here is more bottom up, value-critical, person-centered, demand-driven, nonlinear, and fluid” (5). The book is usefully organized into four parts: “Foundations,” “Pre-industrial Era,” “Mass Market Emergence,” and “Segmentation and Diversity.” The essays throughout are, for the most part, written by the most [End Page 571] important scholars in the fields of print culture and book history. Just a few examples will suffice to demonstrate the depth of training and expertise contributors bring to the volume: Jared Gardner writes the chapter “Magazines to 1820,” for example, while Sandra M. Gustafson writes “Oral Genres and Print” and Tom F. Wright writes “Lyceums, Public Lectures and Print.” Eric Gardner’s essay, “Black Engagement with Print,” and Phillip H. Round’s, “Native Imprints and Readers,” are notable contributions. In nearly every chapter, authors undertake a generous and detailed survey of the field, highlighting their own interests and arguments but not allowing them to dominate the essay. As Zboray and Zboray note in the introduction, the organization of the book is intended to indicate continuity as well as change over the centuries, with the past and present mingled in printing technologies, reading practices, and the purchasing of texts, among other things. Part 1, “Foundations,” contains chapters on authorship, readers, libraries, bookstores, and other concepts integral to any consideration of print culture. Each chapter considers its topic within the broad period covered by the History and presents a summary of the relevant work in the field. As the title of the section indicates, these essays provide a foundation for the work of the rest of the book. Zboray and Zboray’s “Readers,” for example, emphasizes “actual readers’ daily experiences” and argues that it is to our benefit to broaden our definition of reading to a variety of texts and encounters (62). Several of the chapters in this section address the circulation of imprints: Wayne Wiegand, for example, examines the dual and sometimes contradictory goals of libraries to simultaneously uplift...

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray Amy Sopcak-Joseph (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Print culture, Print production, Book history, Cultural history The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860. Edited by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 712. Cloth, $135.00). [End Page 763] A volume with the name “Oxford History” imprinted on it often evokes a specific vision: a weighty tome with hundreds of pages between its boards and a title embossed in neat gold lettering on the wide spine. The book likely sits on the shelf of a personal or university library. This staid vision is the opposite of the kinds of reading matter, and implied readers, that US Popular Print Culture to 1860 takes as its subject in its forty chapters. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture is a nine-volume series; Volume 5 is the third to see publication. In it, editors Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray offer up an interdisciplinary set of forty-one contributors from history and literature departments as well as schools of communication and library and information sciences. The result is a collection that not only contextualizes a diverse array of popular texts but also expands the boundaries of what forms constituted “popular print” to begin with. The entire Oxford series centers on the question, “What kind of reading was ‘popular reading’?” (61). The editors of Volume 5 intend to upend any quick and easy answer that their own readers might have in mind. Zboray and Zboray charge that the field of book history in the United States, with which these essays are in conversation, is “too top-down, value-laden, object-centered, supply-sided, processual, and restrictive for a history of popular print culture” (5). While Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin might have sold more copies than any book except the Bible, the Zborays’s volume moves away from privileging bestsellers and even the book form itself. US Popular Print Culture to 1860 strives instead to take cues from early American readers and embraces a capacious definition of “popular print.” In this telling, any kind of text that readers often engaged with falls under the scope. This includes imprints that were produced cheaply and inexpensively for wide distribution. These chapters, however, are attentive to how “alternative literacies” contributed to popular reading (61). Early Americans read letters and wampum belts, copied lines into commonplace books that they circulated among friends, attended lyceum lectures by well-known authors, and viewed commercialized pictures. The editorial decision to focus on the intersection of “popular” print with these oral and manuscript cultures distinguishes this volume from another epic undertaking on the subject, the multi-volume A History of the Book in America series produced in the 2000s by the American Antiquarian Society and published by the University of North Carolina Press. This volume is divided into four parts that are carefully crafted to avoid conveying a progressive narrative or imbuing certain genres with [End Page 764] significance over others. The editors stress that the four parts emphasize “stratification” and that much of the content introduced in early chapters “remains valid throughout ensuing chapters” (10). Within Parts II through IV, chapters appear in alphabetical order to avoid the appearance of ranking each subject’s importance. Such organization drives home two primary goals of the volume. First, Zboray and Zboray take issue with the argument that the history of print in the British North American colonies and the early republic could be characterized by a shift from “scarcity to abundance” (7).1 Second, they demonstrate significant continuities in the production, distribution, and usage of popular print amid technological, economic, and cultural changes. Parts I and II provide a baseline understanding of the production and distribution of texts as well as the genres familiar to early Americans. Part I, “Foundations,” includes synthetic overviews of staple topics of book history: print and book production, authorship, literacy and education, and the circulation of print from the colonial period through 1860...

Limits of the Trace

Limits of the Trace Moinak Biswas (bio) A VERY OLD MACHINE: THE MANY ORIGINS OF THE CINEMA IN INDIA BY SUDHIR MAHADEVAN State University of New York, 2015 Sudhir Mahadevan's book represents a salutary shift to historical investigation in Indian film scholarship, a move away from engagement with contemporary Bombay film, often ahistorically called Bollywood. A Very Old Machine tells us how the cinematic apparatus has been put together in India, as technology and practice, as both maker and product of an experiential modernity that was not meant to conform to a normative model of modern practices in this part of the world. The "very old" of the title refers to both the age of the machine and the persistence of some of the most ancient film-viewing contraptions in the present, while the machine the author has in mind is both the contraptions and the moments of their specific assembling. Mimicking its own intuition about the interrupted chronology of the tools and institutions it surveys, the book goes back and forth in time, signals multiple moments of inauguration for the story, and leaves one narrative line midway to take up another, thus making the case for a historiographic model even as it writes history. Mahadevan's inquiry is itself a product of a moment where the everyday and the archive, two concepts invoked throughout the book, cross paths more frequently and visibly than ever. The digital turn has foregrounded such intersection in its manifold occurrence. Spontaneous storage of photographs, films, music, and texts in personal computers and conversations between databases across disciplines and [End Page 192] territories have made the archiving impulse ordinary and visible and freed it to a radical extent from notions of value so far as the stored objects are concerned. Anything and everything is collectible; the boundaries of ephemera extend to include every odd thing as a trace left by something. The traces that the book explores have no apparent relationship with archiving in that sense, but the optic it uses and the logic of movement through time it follows must owe its inspiration to a moment when we have begun to accumulate impressions of the past as acts of reflex. The gaps the book leaves in the story-structuring gaps—if one might call them—echo the very form that everyday archiving has taken on. The chapter "Copyright and Cultural Authenticity" (chapter 3) is in a way an acknowledgment of this connection. It outlines the context of the emergence of legislative measures to secure intellectual property over images, especially photographs and their prints, which in their "mass cultural" form posed a serious challenge to proprietary control in the nineteenth century. Mahadevan says he wants to explore a different archive here, one that moves from the question of the "viability of the machines" discussed in the preceding chapters to the "commercial 'viability' of images" (68). The chapter outlines the efflorescence of photography and popular print culture (e.g., chromolithography), mostly in the colonial city of Calcutta, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which became an "archive" located at its meeting point with the question of proprietorship. At such intersections, questions of originality and artistic autonomy (artisan versus artist, copy versus original), as well as the question of authorship in general, get foregrounded. The logic of the market, which seemed to drive the bargain in favor of intellectual property, created obstacles in the path of commercial expansion of image production, a paradox that the author brings to our attention. These questions have informed a very fruitful debate over digital commons and intellectual property across the world since the beginning of the new millennium. Indian scholars and activists have made a significant contribution to it.1 Mahadevan is certainly a part of this intellectual project. A slightly older discourse that examined the machine and the apparatus through the grid of ideology and desire, found prominently in film theory in the 1970s, informs the book's strategy to move from the history of technology to accounts of circulation to inscriptions of form [End Page 193] and politics. Cinema remains the elusive object here. Cultural Studies– oriented film scholarship also tended to render the films themselves...

Blather, Razzle and Dada: Contextualizing Brian O'Nolan's Early Journalism

This essay develops recent critical discussions of Brian O'Nolan's short-lived comic periodical, Blather, by further contextualizing the magazine amidst the popular and avant-garde print culture of its period. First, I undertake a detailed comparison of Blather with the English comic periodical Razzle, revealing the features which are lifted directly from this model and exploring the significance of Razzle's use of metaleptic humour for O'Nolan's work more widely. Subsequently, I place Blather in the context of the publications and activities of the Berlin Dadaists and specifically their magazine Der Dada. I propose three characteristics it shares with Blather: what I term the ‘extended identity trope’; the subversion of popular culture with photomontage techniques; and an engagement with the creative possibilities of advertising. In conclusion, I propose that these contexts shed light on the cohabitation of modernist experimentation and a popular orientation which characterises Blather and O'Nolan's wider literary project.

The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, We Told You So: Comics as Art and Spurgeon with Michael Dean

The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, We Told You So: Comics as Art and Spurgeon with Michael Dean

Una aproximación comparada a la imprenta popular del siglo XVIII en España e Inglaterra: Agustín Laborda y Cluer Dicey

This article aims to carry out a comparative approach between the Spanish «literatura de cordel» and the English street literature in the 18th century. It analyzes the professional careers of two of the most important printers in the production of «pliegos sueltos» and chapbooks: Cluer Dicey and Agustin Laborda. Besides studying their publishing strategies, the article aims to analyze the kind of prints they published, in order to establish similitudes and differences between the Spanish and English popular print culture.

The battle for St Peter’s chair: mediating the materials of Catholic antiquity in nineteenth-century Britain

This article explores how one object—the alleged papal throne of St Peter in the Vatican—became a battleground for Protestant and Catholic readings of the early history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. For many progressive Protestants, archaeology provided the long-sought-after scientific and material vindication of the authority of scripture. But critical analysis of scripture and historical texts could either authenticate or discredit sacred things. As tangible traces of Catholic apostolic authority, the material remains of early Roman Christianity provoked much religious, moral, and political debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article discusses how these debates were mediated in popular print and visual culture in Britain and Ireland by examining a widely publicized pamphlet debate between the English Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and the Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Although this was a debate about the theological authority exerted by the material remains of the past, the battle over Peter’s chair was conducted exclusively in the realm of word and image through exegesis and illustration.

Invisible pictures

Abstract In September 2016 the special collections library that preserves historical American illustration at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, was named after D. B. Dowd. A longtime professor in the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Dowd is a tireless advocate for the preservation and study of popular print culture and was instrumental in the establishment of this library in 2007. The D. B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library (DMGHL) is a repository of printed and original illustration and of several prominent illustrators’ estates, including those of the legendary Al Parker and Robert Weaver. The DMGHL is also a study centre open to students, scholars and the public, and a leader in illustration studies and research. The Journal of Illustration is pleased to print verbatim Dowd’s speech given on the occasion of the naming. – ed.

Free Trade and Print Culture: Political Communication in Early Nineteenth-Century England

This article highlights the potency of traditional popular print culture as a form of political communication for one of the pioneering campaigns of the nineteenth century: the free trade agitation of the 1840s. Contributing to recent debates about Victorian political communication, it challenges the view that the spread of literacy and print replaced a more traditional, inclusive, hybrid style of communication. The use and adaptation of broadside culture that blurred literacy, orality and visuality proved to be a more effective means of communicating free trade to popular audiences than ‘modern’ methods of political communication such as official newspapers or mass propaganda. Joseph Livesey, the most successful free trade populariser, was able to bridge the gap between free trade and Chartism, by drawing on elements of radical print culture, while seeking to shift them onto a more respectable trajectory. Livesey and cheap free trade print culture anticipated the shift from popular radicalism to popular liberalism in political culture and popular politics that occurred after 1850.

“I see enough queers walking the streets in this city”: Homosexuality and Sexual Geographies in Black Consumer Magazines during the 1970s

This article examines the representations of black homosexuality during the 1970s in Ebony and Jet, America’s most popular black periodicals. As two of the most important “indigenous information sources” available to black communities during this period, Ebony and Jet played a critical role in shaping broader public perceptions and anxieties over black respectability, queer identity, and homosexual desire. Through the contributions of predominantly heterosexual and male “experts” such as Alvin Poussaint and Winston Moore, these magazines helped to reinforce pervasive fears regarding the potential “threat” posed by homosexuality to black families and black communities, and contributed to a broader policing of nonheteronormative desire within black urban spaces. However, many of the magazines’ readers offered a more progressive vision of homosexuality and its relationship to the black community, and attempted to redefine the public boundaries of black respectability. Through addressing the complex intersections of race, respectability and physical space, this article provides a fresh insight into the spatialization of black sexual and gender minorities within black popular print culture, and the highly contested “geographies of black gender and sexual marginality.”

Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan

This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth; moreover, it contends that there was a surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism among the rank-and-file “salarymen” of the urban Japanese middle class. Finally, the precisely informed humor found in these comics also suggests that their target audience possessed detailed familiarity with contemporary events on the continent and interpreted those events through a deeply embedded cultural framework of ambivalence concerning modern Chinese society.

Constructing the Canadian Lowbrow Magazine: The Periodical as Media Object in the 1930s and 1940s

ABSTRACT Historians of Canadian popular print culture commonly refer to a “golden age” of English Canadian periodical publishing (1940–46), which was the result of wartime restrictions on the importation of popular magazines from the United States. This article examines a corpus of Canadian periodicals published before and after this golden age. In the late 1930s, before the introduction of wartime measures, a handful of Toronto-based publishers launched titles that reprinted, revised, and repurposed material from U.S. periodicals. After the end of the war, when protections for Canadian periodicals were first dropped, then reintroduced in weakened form, Canadian publishers engaged once again in the reprinting of U.S. materials.

Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” and Discourse on Contraband Slaves in Popular Print Culture

Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” and Discourse on Contraband Slaves in Popular Print Culture