Popular Reading Research Articles

Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant (review)

Reviewed by: Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant Jeffery Moser Stephen H. Grant. Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2014. 244p. Stay, and let there be no bloody question whether Stephen Grant’s second critical work, Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, has garnered permanent shelf space and digital cataloguing by the famous library in Washington, D.C. (rather than across the pond in London), that holds 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, 60,000 manuscripts and hundreds of valuable artwork related to the playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and his time. Located on Capitol Hill, the library was built and paid for from the bulk of Henry C. Folger’s fortune, left in a trust and naming his alma mater, Amherst, as perpetual administrator (the college’s trustees were surprised by the announcement when Henry died). The library is a national historic landmark, designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945), who also designed the Pan American Union in Washington and the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Folgers envisioned the library for showcasing the dramatist and poet’s art and preserving his genius, and thus, with it named after Shakespeare and themselves, the futurist-minded couple set down their own legacy, too. Three hundred years after Shakespeare lived and more than a century ago from our time, the Folgers, seemingly full partners in marriage and collecting, went about acquiring nearly everything of, by, and for England’s great bard – measure for measure and as they liked it. The couple obviously took to heart Ben Jonson’s dedicatory remarks in the First Folio what Shakespeare left us: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” Grant’s book explains how the exacting and persistent Folgers worked to make sure of that. Their endgame, of course, became the permanent housing of their private collection in the national library the two sited and willed as a lasting gift to the American people. To make the occasion truly Shakespearean, prosaic and appropriate, the library was officially dedicated in dramatic fashion on Shakespeare’s ascribed birthday and deathday, April 23rd. Many representatives of America’s wealthy and elite, politicians, and scholars were present including President Herbert Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover (she was a noted [End Page 220] scholar and linguist). Sadly though, one luminary was absent: Henry Folger, who had passed away in June 1930. Nonetheless, if the past 400-plus years of reading, studying, and performing Shakespeare were not enough, the Folgers’ actions sincerely added to the scholarly and popular interest in Shakespeare and his works in the United States and of mythical proportion around the world. Grant is a senior fellow at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and previously authored the biography, Peter Strickland: New London Shipmaster, Boston Merchant, First Consul to Senegal (New Academia, 2006). Of note, like Henry Folger, Grant, is also Amherst alum. Laden with history about the Folger Library, interesting facts and cameos encapsulating the Folgers’ lives and networks, and anecdotes about history’s most celebrated author, Grant’s book offers a treasure trove to the researcher’s obvious targeted audience of historians, scholars, readers, and performers of Shakespeare. Attuned to effective marketing and successful sales, Grant’s 244-page book was published in hardcover and released by John Hopkins University Press in February of 2014 to herald Shakespeare’s spring birthday and coincide with the 450th anniversary of his birth year. Hence, the book respectably documents the lives of the husband-wife duo that collected the mass of rare Shakespearean materials (now worth millions of dollars) and founded the Folger Shakespeare Library, which opened to the public in 1932. In the tradition of Elizabethan theatre, Grant offers both a prologue and epilogue to his work, along with acknowledgements, an appendix of directors for the Folger, notes, bibliography and index. Adding to its archival durability and scholarly aspect yet popular reading interest, the book includes dozens of black and white photographs, drawings, and tables, most of them portraits of the Folgers, of Shakespeare and other persons connected with the library, and depicting the elegant Elizabethan...

Framing pandemic management: New governance, science or culture?

Management of a pandemic engages multiple sites where previously settled or uncontroversial understandings may be transformed by global and domestic forces. This article examines the iconography of social distancing implicated in the discourses of ‘quarantine’ and ‘risk control’ in public health, and the tension between scientific and popular media readings of the contours of acceptable public health models for managing particular pandemics. The role of culture in shaping and reshaping borders at an operational level is explored as a basis for explaining the apparent paradoxes in the way historic and contemporary pandemics are actually managed, and the different ways particular pandemics are framed. The article argues that a rational-scientific approach to pandemic management is insufficient and that a more nuanced socio-political blend of science, culture and public perceptions offers a more substantial basis for public health policy.

Psychometric properties and factor structure of an L2 reading motivation questionnaire

The purpose of this study is to investigate the psychometric properties and factor structure of a popular second language reading motivation questionnaire developed by Mori (2002). 550 first year high school students in Korea answered the 30-item questionnaire which consists of statements indicating different degrees of English reading motivation. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted with principal axis factoring and promax rotation, which yielded a four-factor solution. The factors included 'Intercultural and Intellectual Orientation', 'Reading Efficacy', 'Intrinsic Motivation', and 'Negative Attitudes'. The results supported the multidimensionality of the construct of L2 reading motivation, but could not replicate the nine factor structure which was originally proposed by Mori. The implications for further research on L2 reading motivation and development of a more valid L2 reading scale are discussed.

Arbiters with guns: the ambiguity of military involvement in civilian disputes in the DR Congo

Based on extensive field research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), this article elucidates the logics, processes and readings surrounding certain ‘extra-military’ practices enacted by the Congolese army, namely the processing of various types of disputes between civilians. Exceeding the boundaries of the domain of ‘public security’, such activities are commonly categorised as ‘corruption’. Yet such labelling, founded on a supposed clear-cut public–private divide, obscures the underlying processes and logics, in particular the fact that these practices are located on a blurred public–private spectrum and result from both civilian demand and military imposition. Furthermore, popular readings of military involvement in civilian disputes are highly ambiguous, simultaneously representing it as ‘abnormal’ and ‘harmful’, and normalising it as ‘making sense’ – reflecting the militarised institutional environment and the weakness of civilian authorities in the eastern DR Congo. Strengthening these authorities will be vital for reducing this practice, which has an enkindling effect on the dynamics of conflict and violence.

Popularizing marine natural history in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

The literary and pedagogic style of books popularizing marine natural history for the British public shifted during the nineteenth century. Previously, natural history books had been written largely by men, with notable exceptions like Isabella Gifford, Mary Gatty and Mary Roberts. Gentlemen naturalists tended to be clerics or medics; educated men conventionally viewing their interest as revelatory of the Divine in nature. Typically, women were less well educated than men but some from clerical backgrounds, having better access to learning, became significant popularizers of natural history. Gosse's works promoting aquaria and “rock-pooling” (typically among the middle classes), helped to develop a ready market for the plethora of popular seashore books appearing in the 1850s; with coastal access being facilitated by expansion of the railways. Controversies concerning evolution rarely penetrated works aimed at a popular readership. However, the style adopted by marine natural history writers had changed noticeably by the end of the nineteenth century. The earlier conversational dialogue or narrative forms gave way to a more terse scientific style, omitting references to the Divine. Evolutionary ideas were affecting populist texts on littoral natural history, even if only covertly.

On the Chaos in Chandos: Hofmannsthal on Modernity’s Threshold

On the Chaos in Chandos:Hofmannsthal on Modernity’s Threshold Patrick Greaney (bio) In 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal published “A Letter,” in which a certain Lord Chandos writes to Francis Bacon to “excuse himself” for his “complete abandonment of literary activity.”1 It’s difficult to think of another short literary work in German that has received as much attention as this “founding text of literary high modernism.”2 Often, “A Letter” is introduced by literary critics as a straightforward account of falling into a “profound state of speechlessness,” and many commentators repeat Chandos’s presentation of this state, as if this work of literature were nothing more than a description of a character’s breakdown.3 Recent scholarship has avoided the once popular reading of “A Letter” as a “document” of Hofmannsthal’s biographical travails, [End Page 563] but many critics still interpret Chandos’s statements as if they recorded a real crisis.4 They seem to imagine their task as a Chandos diagnosis. “This character, Lord Chandos, has been taken at his word, which has directed attention away from literary knowledge of the text,” Rudolf Helmstetter writes, and readers, he continues, have “remained on the level of the character and his narcissistic self-deceptions and repeated his misjudgments with more or less empathy and emphasis.”5 What would it mean to pay attention to the literary aspect of “A Letter”? What would literary knowledge look like here? To read “A Letter” as a literary work first requires taking Chandos at his word, retracing his presentation of his crisis, but this can only be a preface to another kind of reading, one that no longer respects the integrity of anyone’s word. Chandos writes that he has “completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently [zusammenhängend] about anything at all” (121, 465). He can still do these things, just not coherently; there’s no speechlessness here. His problems begin with an experience of “abstract words…disintegrat[ing] in my mouth like rotten mushrooms;” he feels an “inexplicable uneasiness even pronouncing the words ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘body’” (121, 465). Words are no longer vehicles, but impediments. They are too corporeal to pronounce with confidence even the word “body.” This crisis comes about as he works on a collection, to be titled Nosce te ipsum, of apophthegmata or aphorisms, which would have included quotations from Chandos’s contemporaries as well as from ancient sources, including the “description” (“Beschreibung”) of architectural works (119, 463).6 This plan is made possible, according to Chandos, by his “drunken” vision of “all of existence as one grand unity” (120, 463–64). He feels this when he drinks fresh milk and when he takes in “sweet and foamy nourishment” from books. He insists on his mastery in these situations: some “tousled rustic” brings the milk to Chandos’s hunting lodge, and the books belong to him and are read in his study (120, 464). In his [End Page 564] experience of unity, “I had the intuition that everything was a symbol and every creature a key to another, and I felt I was surely the one who could take hold of each in turn and open as many of the others as would open [eine nach der andern bei der Krone zu packen und mit ihr so viele der andern aufzusperren, als sie aufsperren könnte]” (120, 464). This is how he summarizes his intentions: I wanted to open up [aufschließen] the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure and show how they are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. (119, 463) Chandos insists here on “opening up” things and himself and gaining access to insides and interiorities. But as he proceeds with his “encyclopedic” project, these putative hieroglyphs take on their own life and become “dizzying whirlpools which spin around and around and lead into the void,” which is also a kind of inside (122, 466). He presents this change as a catastrophe, but his post-crisis situation is not all that different from his original state.7 In this new relation to the...

The Unequal Promise of Marriage Equality

What kind of right is the right to marry? “The Unequal Promise of Marriage Equality” examines the coincident decisions of Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder , which invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, and United States v. Windsor , which declared unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act and opened the door to federal recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States. In considering these decisions, I argue against popular readings that interpreted the former decision as a regressive turn from racial equality and the latter as a progressive move toward equality for same-sex couples. Instead, I read the power relations legislated in the “right to marry,” a right whose racialized history demands a more complex vision of what constitutes a progressive politics.

The Image of Russia in French Public Opinion, 1811–12

The Image of Russia in French Public Opinion, 1811–12 Nikolai Promyslov Translated by Anton Fedyashin (bio) European intellectuals, including philosophers and literary figures, actively debated Russia’s present and future throughout the 18th century. The “Russian mirage” steadily lost appeal for a variety of reasons, including the country’s growing influence in international affairs, increasing involvement in European politics, and the declining popularity of the Enlightenment itself. By the time of the French Revolution, Russia’s negative characteristics as a despotic, uncivilized, and therefore especially dangerous country began to predominate in public opinion.1 Most 18th-century essays about Russia, however, found only a limited audience among the intellectual and political elite of France, while impressions about the Russian Empire among the wider public were vague. This changed during the revolution and Napoleonic era, when the negative image of Russia was widely disseminated among the general [End Page 235] audience by state propaganda and—later—memoirs and remained entrenched for years to come. Several factors contributed to the pervasive influence of Russia’s negative image during the Napoleonic Wars. First, a widening sector of the populace came into contact with printed propaganda, including the bulletins of the Grande Armée that were reprinted in newspapers, as well as pamphlets. The impact of the French press on public opinion during the First Empire increased both because of the growing consumption of dailies and because of the convergence in editorial politics.2 A significant increase in literacy was also an important factor. The state-published Moniteur universel was the major organ of propaganda, and it gained an advantage over other papers by printing information delivered directly to it by government ministries.3 An 1807 circular established that the Moniteur universel would hold a monopoly on all political information, which other publications would have to cull from it. Furthermore, materials printed in the Moniteur universel, especially bulletins issued by the army, were read aloud during Sunday services in every parish and in special public announcements at city halls for the benefit of illiterate Frenchmen.4 Propaganda had occupied the attention of Napoleon since the very beginning of his career, and he owed his popularity as a general under the Directory to the influence of the press.5 Special publications were issued to cover his campaigns in Italy and Egypt, which the Paris press closely followed.6 Napoleon personally dictated and edited the bulletins of the Grande Armée during the Russian campaign. The second factor contributing to the pervasiveness of Russia’s negative image was private correspondence.7 This became an important avenue for [End Page 236] disseminating information about Russia in the early 19th century, when for the first time letters began arriving to France from Russia in vast numbers. Over 300,000 French soldiers and officers were part of the Grande Armée during the 1812 campaign; tens of thousands remained in Russia as prisoners of war (POWs) after the fighting ended, and the overwhelming number wrote letters to family members and friends. The result was that back home they came to be considered highly qualified experts on Russia, and their letters were even more widely disseminated thanks to the tradition of collectively reading aloud, still practiced in France in the early 19th century. If a soldier’s family was illiterate, the letter was often addressed to the local priest (curé), exposing its contents to even more “readers.” Letters were also often shared with family members of fellow soldiers.8 Soldiers’ memoirs were a third factor shaping public opinion about Russia in France, and they remained popular reading material throughout the 19th century. Thanks to the ubiquity of revolutionary and Napoleonic war veterans, who told their tales everywhere, even those who did not read books about Napoleon could hardly avoid exposure to the developing legend about the Russian campaign. Regardless of whether listeners believed these tales, they affected French attitudes toward their past and toward themselves.9 In the words of Jean-Paul Bertaud, veterans became “bards of the Great Nation” (conteurs de la Grande Nation).10 The list of autobiographical writings is long. Authors came from all social classes: marshals, generals, quartermasters, and even the lower ranks. Among the...

Twentieth-Century Experiments in Form: A Critical Re-reading of Cecilia Vicuna's Indigenism as Episteme

This article explores the art and poetics of Chilean born Cecilia Vicuña in the contemporary context of indigenismo, while simultaneously questioning the capacity of ethnopoetics to fully engage the political, cultural, and social reaches of transnational aesthetics in the twentieth century. Using César Paternosto's study of Incan stone work and architecture, I locate Vicuña's use of the spiral in her 1966 landart installation and poetic performance, Con-cón, in relation to indigenismo's stance within and against the global politics that redefine the late twentieth century during the rise of neoliberalism and the culture clash between an already unstable Latin American middle class and North American consumerism. I locate Vicuña's critique of consumerism, complacency, and the subordination of environmental concerns by comparing her use of the spiral to that of Robert Smithson in Spiral Jetty (1972), to D'Arcy Thompson's writing on the mathematics of biological and zoological examples of spirals and sea shells (1917), and to Vicuña's more recent poetic experiments in text, form, and philology in Instan (2002). The construction of alternative modes of “knowing” and expressing knowledge via the spiral explores ways of reading experimental poetry like Vicuña's and opens experimental poetry as a site for popular readings of democratic language. The experimental politics of Vicuña's Chile, expressed by the spiral at Con-cón, refers to a poetic practice of democratic individualism that begins at the locale, and extends in a non-linear curvature. Vicuña's poetry and art constitute an epistemology that recurs during the performance of locality and redefines the collective expression of historical time from the events of language that realize the present.

POPULAR READING AND SOCIAL INVESTIGATION IN BRITAIN, 1850s–1940s

ABSTRACT‘What do the masses read?’ After popular literacy and an urban market for mass culture became conspicuous in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, dozens of literary figures and social researchers took it upon themselves to answer this question. Middle-class inquirers sought in newsagents' wares a vicarious connection with the culture and values of the readers of popular fiction. Many of these investigators, from Wilkie Collins in the 1850s to George Orwell in the 1930s, practised a form of literary criticism that doubled as social criticism. Other students of popular reading – Florence Bell in her study of early twentieth-century Middlesbrough and Mass-Observation in its surveys of reading during the Second World War – worked at the margins of British traditions of social research. Critics working from the texts of popular fiction tended to concentrate on questions of style and ideology; those doing fieldwork focused on reading as a social practice. Examining the corpus of studies of popular literacy from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century opens up the question of the scope of literary criticism and social research in modern Britain.

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Popular Reading in English, c. 1400–1600

Popular Reading in English, c. 1400–1600

Hypothetical Journalism in MACOSA Experience: The Nation and its Internet Readership Status

This research was aimed at establishing whether truly there is a benchmark for appreciation of news contents in The Nation hardcopy and its internet version, by extension equipping students of Mass Communication as campus ecclesiasts. The students of Mass Communication Department, Cross River University of Technology, Calabar Campus – formed the research population. The sampled media were selected using the “hat and draw method.” The period under review was January, 2013 to June, 2013, and one hundred and fifty (150) students, were the sampled. Two research questions were presented; using questionnaire as the survey instrument in determining to what extent their news contents were preferable. It was experimented on „Uses and Gratification‟ and „Media Dependency‟ Theories revealing that the popular reading culture of the hardcopy by the students was 76.6%, comparatively greater than the 16.7% of the online version users – due to availability of hardcopies and infeasible presence of internet facilities, lack of fund to sustain mobile browsing capacity. Readership frequencies for hardcopy and net versions were 55.3% and 38%. And 6.7% were nonreaders of the two. The research made some major revelations in line with encouraging campus journalism; one of them was that Mass Communication students of CRUTECH, Calabar should improve their reading culture as in expanding their frontiers of knowledge and by so doing dilate some level of hypothesis in the campus journalism practice. In a splint of hope, the study, recommended that the school‟s library and Mass Communication resource room should be accorded internet facilities and contemporarily stocked print media publications. As to ignite the learning environment at minimal or no cost; „Open Sesame‟ to the world as global village is accessible from a wider reading spectrum, this will go a long way in influencing campus journalistic crave. The road to Damascus is realized if only these revelations are not under-dogged, as envisaged in the paradigm shift of brain drain and resources to qualitative opportunities in neigbouring African countries.

Review

Reviewed by: German Popular Stories. By the Brothers Grimm. Adapted by Edgar Taylor ed. by Jack Zipes Jennifer Schacker (bio) German Popular Stories. By the Brothers Grimm. Adapted by Edgar Taylor. Edited by Jack Zipes. Kent, UK: Crescent Moon, 2012. 387 pp. The bicentennial anniversary of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) generated renewed dialogue about the significance of that landmark publication, including the international scope of its influence in the nineteenth century and beyond. It is in this context that Crescent Moon has issued a reprint of the first English treatment of the Grimms’ fairy tales: Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories, with an introductory essay and appendixes by Jack Zipes. Working with the 1819 edition of the KHM, Taylor took many liberties as a translator, combining stories, Anglicizing names and titles, eliminating some religious references, downplaying violence and bloody detail, rendering threatening figures comical, and so on. Such choices have generated nearly 200 years of unfavorable critique (at least from many scholars), and Taylor has become a relatively obscure figure in fairy-tale studies today. Nevertheless, the 1823 edition of German Popular Stories, Translated from the Kinder und Haus Märchen [sic] Collected by M.M. Grimm, from Oral Tradition, illustrated by George Cruikshank and published by Charles Baldwyn, was an immensely popular and influential book. It was reprinted in 1824 and 1825, followed by a second volume in 1826 and a revised edition in 1837 (shortly before Taylor’s death). In fact, the publishing history of German Popular Stories rivals that of the KHM in its complexity. To begin with, Taylor was not the sole translator of the first volume, but neither his name nor that of his collaborator, David Jardine, appears on that book. Moreover, the edition of German Popular Stories cited most frequently—and the one on which this reprint edition is based—is a single-volume edition published by John Camden Hotten thirty years after Taylor’s death. The 1868 edition combined the contents of the 1823 and 1826 volumes and was introduced by John Ruskin (himself a small child when the book first appeared). The current volume is neither a facsimile edition nor an annotated one, but in addition to the introduction, Zipes has included [End Page 394] important documents as appendixes: Ruskin’s influential introductory essay from the 1868 edition (which offers a snapshot of later Victorian debates about the nature of the genre and its audiences); letters to Taylor from Sir Walter Scott and Taylor’s correspondence with the Grimms, all from the 1820s; and the opening pages and introduction to the 1837 edition of German Popular Stories, which firmly established Grimms’ fairy tales as English children’s literature. In his own introduction Zipes traces the complex history of German Popular Stories and offers critical context for what he calls “a revolutionary book” (16). Zipes argues persuasively that the success of German Popular Stories canonized Grimms’ fairy tales as English literature for children and established a specific vision of the fairy tale as viable print commodity. Importantly, Taylor’s interest in the KHM and his initial approach to the project were informed by the ideas and rhetoric of antiquarianism, and to his credit Taylor did address some of his editing choices in the notes he appended to each of the 1823 and 1826 editions, combined and included (with only minor emendations) in Hotten’s 1868 edition and also in the current Crescent Moon reprint. Those first editions of German Popular Stories stand as early examples of a marriage between popular print culture and scholarly discourse so characteristic of nineteenth-century British folklore study, and the Grimms’ own “small edition” of 1825 was inspired by the success of Taylor’s English book (see pages 26 and 360–66). Although Zipes addresses the ways in which both the Grimms and Taylor negotiated that borderline between scholarly and popular discourses, his main concern in the introductory essay is the role that Taylor played (perhaps inadvertently) in transforming the Grimms’ collection into “amusing popular reading material for children” (32). As a result, Zipes attends less than he might to the book’s history as a story of textual experimentation or the...

Partly Cloudy With a Chance of Entertainment: An Academic Library's Experience With a Popular Reading Ebook Resource

ABSTRACT Ebooks pose many challenges in library collection development, mostly due to the lack of standards and the many different platforms available. These challenges are faced by both public and academic libraries, but the challenges inherent in collecting popular reading ebooks can be different from the challenges that come with collecting scholarly ebooks. This article describes the purpose and processes behind an academic library, University of Wyoming Libraries, providing popular reading ebooks to its faculty and students, and focuses on the experience of being a 3M Cloud Library early adopter.

Australian comparison data for the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE)

This paper reports provisional Australian comparison data and scoring instructions for the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE). The TOWRE is a popular reading fluency test used in reading research, classroom assessment and clinical practice. Approximate ‘norms’ were obtained from children attending four primary schools in New South Wales. Results suggested that the US norms for the TOWRE may overestimate the reading level of Australian children in lower grades and that the performance on the two parallel forms (A and B) of the subtests (Sight Word Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency) of the TOWRE did not differ from each other. While no performance differences were found between boys and girls overall, it was noted that the youngest boys outperformed the youngest girls on Form A of the Sight Word Efficiency subtest, and the youngest girls outperformed the youngest boys on Form B of the Sight Word Efficiency subtest. Limitations of the current study are discussed and a brief reference is made to a new (2012) edition of TOWRE (TOWRE-2).

Comparison of the WRAT4 Reading Subtest and the WTAR for Estimating Premorbid Ability Level

The need to estimate premorbid ability level as part of a neuropsychological evaluation is well understood in the profession. The purpose of this study was to evaluate two popular reading tests for estimating premorbid ability. Participants were 102 undergraduate volunteers between the ages of 18 and 64 years (M = 25.89 years, SD = 9.54). Participants completed the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR) and both forms of the Reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test-Fourth Edition (WRAT4). The WTAR was scored using the Predicted Full-Scale IQ (FSIQ) and the Demographic Predicted FSIQ methods presented in the manual. Repeated-measures analyses of variance revealed no significant difference between the two forms of the WRAT4 and the WTAR for both the Predicted FSIQ, F(2, 202) = 0.399, p = .671, and the Demographic Predicted FSIQ, F(2, 190) = 0.085, p = .918, scoring approaches. Concurrent validity correlation coefficients between the three items using the Predicted FSIQ ranged from r = .75 to r = .78; using the Demographic Predicted FSIQ, coefficients ranged from r = .50 to r = .76. Our data suggest that the WTAR offers a slightly more reliable statistical portrait of cognitive functioning, especially with a more educated and originally higher-functioning population.

The “Nightmare of History” in James Joyce’s Ulysses

The majority of readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to associate its most famous line, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” with Stephen Dedalus’s intention in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to overcome his past of rigid national and religious tradition. While this meaning is immediately present in the quote, a closer reading of the text suggests a far more ambitious–and perhaps even vain–impetus behind the identification of history as a nightmare. Additionally, just as the most popular reading has an autobiographical dimension–in which Joyce himself seeks to transcend his own tutelage–so does the alternate reading I present in this essay have implications for both Dedalus and Joyce.

Women and Their Bodies in the Popular Reading of 1910

This article discusses the presentation of women's bodies in popular newspapers that reflects an awareness of reproductive health and access to the knowledge and language of sex, ?on or about December 1910?. Originating in Virginia Woolf's biographical writing, diaries and letters, it uses the popular reading of the British public in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, including features and adverts in newspapers, health manuals, and commercially successful novels, to show how Woolf's isolation of a single moment of change for human character was, for most of the population, part of a longstanding social evolution in popular sexual knowledge and moral standards. Novels by H G Wells, Joseph Conrad, Una L Silberrad and Arnold Bennett are discussed, as are coded adverts for abortifacients and menstrual irregularity.

Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels by Richard Locke (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels by Richard Locke Thomas P. Fair Richard Locke . Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 218 p. Moving in a different direction from the usual critical examination of a particular era or genre's hegemonic characterization of childhood, Richard Locke's Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels considers ten works of differing style and structure and investigates how the authors incorporate a particular child's story to explore or evade more extensive social and moral issues. Notably, Locke moves beyond a single, thematic focus and considers several varied critical uses of children. For his study, he selects well-known but widely differing characters and works, ranging from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip from Great Expectations to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to Miles and Flora from The Turn of the Screw to Peter Pan and Holden Caulfield and, finally, to the rarely included Lolita and Alexander Portnoy. The ten works that comprise Locke's study all "use children caught in violent situations as vehicles of moral and cultural interrogation" (4). In his introduction, Locke asserts the importance of children as critics of their worlds. He states: "They [the selected child characters] are icons, figures that are taken to embody fundamental possibilities and problems, even long after their historical contexts have vanished" (4). Key to Locke's approach is his desire "to examine how these books about children work as literature . . . that invite and resist interpretation and support and provoke rereading" (4). The thematic descriptions Locke provides for his choices offer a broad range of significant topics: social-political reform, celebration of American democracy, racial and cultural slavery, "imprisoning regressive psychological fixations," "childish social delusions," and "intellectual and moral vanity" (5-6). Although Locke's explanation often begs the question regarding his choices of literary texts, his selections do provide an interesting range of character types and social situations, and his admission that he has selected these "particular ten novels" because of his admiration of them is apparent (6). In his subsequent attempt to provide "a general historic background," Locke offers an insightful but too brief overview of influences such as Blake and Wordsworth and of a variety of pertinent texts up to the present (11). Locke first investigates three novels by Dickens, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations, to argue that the regenerative power of a naturally good childhood will sometimes counter or at least mitigate the moral, emotional, psychological, and physical prisons individuals may confront or that the detrimental influence of a damaged childhood contributes to or facilitates [End Page 81] these aspects of imprisonment. Locke exposes a shift in Dickens from a belief in a sympathetic and inspiring moral icon in Oliver to a realistic, "late-maturing" David Copperfield, and finally to Pip as a "disillusioned exile," demonstrating a decline from "triumphant progress" into "stoic moral realism" thereby restructuring the traditional bildungsroman (49). Locke's chapter on Mark Twain conflates the examination of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the prominent focus on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Exploring both texts and title characters, Locke acknowledges the popular reading of both as a celebration of American character and freedom but posits his own more cynical reading of loss and decline. Recognizing the affirming values and insights Huck gains in his earlier adventures along the river, Locke closely examines the novel's final chapters and argues for a pessimistic reading of the conclusion. He asserts that Huck's agreeing to meet with Tom and Jim refutes his earlier denouncement of "sivilization," and connects the Territory with "cruel, deluded, childish 'fun' and games" thereby suggesting that there "is no possibility of liberty and justice, and the pursuit of happiness is just a boys' game" (85). Locke persuasively argues that the initial perception of Huck and Tom as representatives of American freedom shifts to the defeat of those ideals as they fail to sustain their insight and return to seemingly inescapable social attitudes and games. Locke's subsequent reading of The Turn of the Screw turns from the implicit social criticism of both Dickens and...