Public Reading Research Articles

СОЦИАЛЬНО-ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКАЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТЬ ОРГАНОВ ГОРОДСКОГО САМОУПРАВЛЕНИЯ САРАНСКА В ГОДЫ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ (1914-1918 ГГ.)

The article analyzes the socio-economic activity of Saransk authorities during the First World War. It is noted that a number of additional functions appeared in the town government during the wartime: caring for the war invalids and orphans, helping the sick and wounded soldiers, in connection with this, organizing military hospitals, as well as conducting public readings. The authors come to the conclusion that the war had a very negative impact on the living standards of the urban population. The reason for this was the crisis in industry and agriculture, as well as severance of economic ties.

Texts and Artefacts: Selected Essays on Textual Criticism and Early Christian Manuscripts

Texts and Artefacts: Selected Essays on Textual Criticism and Early Christian Manuscripts

“A great retiring wave”: Stress, Release, and Subjectivity in Dickens's Prosodic Seas

Abstract Dickens's novels are marked by evocative passages that, even within the rich textures of Dickens's polyphonic prose, stand out as heightened and stylistically worked. These passages channel the text toward prose poetry: they resemble arias, theatrically calling attention to themselves, springing from the novels' discursive recitatives. This essay focuses on a cluster of such passages in the climactic “Tempest” chapter of David Copperfield, in three incarnations: the published text of the novel, Dickens's adaptation of the text for one of his public Readings, and the re-creation of a brief portion of that reading in the 2012 film, The Invisible Woman. The essay identifies and analyzes the poetic devices, especially the rhythmic figurations, that Dickens deploys and shows how Dickens works those devices to conjure the sublime and its characteristic effects of dissolution and dispossession that, in this case, both deepen and threaten the coherence of David's subjectivity. The prose poem passages of “Tempest” thus reach beyond the novel's manifest subject into the subjectivities of character, narrator and reader, a dynamic incisively and vividly conveyed in Ralph Fiennes's re-creation of Dickens reading.

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News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Towards a manifesto for a critical digital humanities: critiquing the extractive capitalism of digital society

This article proceeds in two distinct parts. The first section engages with a deliberately small number of popular texts written by discriminating and interrogative consumers and producers of digital culture and society. While these may be dismissed as journalistic texts and sources by those of a more focused academic intent, here these texts are used because they are the connection between academic engagement and wider public readership. As such, they frame what can be termed the critical public engagement with digital capitalism. These texts are read in tandem with my thesis of immaterial capitalism and Marazzi’s’ The Violence of Financial Capitalism. The paper then concludes with what can be described as the ‘manifesto turn’ by raising some questions for a renewed engagement with digital society, to be undertaken from what is termed, an emergent critical digital humanities, as the site of critique and resistance. This is an exercise in what can be labelled Mongrel methodology and ideology, a neo-logism deliberately provocative in intent to signal a post-academic approach, chosen over such traditional descriptors as mixed-methods or assemblage and the like. As such, it may draw on Marxist thought but is not Marxist in ideology or final intent; it is critical of capitalism but acknowledges our on-going existence and possibilities within it; it is written by an academic seeking to act as intermediary between academic and non-academic readings and responses. It is a deliberate act of provocation as a manifesto call for change.

THE POPULARITY OF ANCIENT HISTORIANS, 1450–1600

AbstractThe histories of ancient Greece and Rome are part of a shared European heritage, and a foundation for many modern Western social and cultural traditions. Their printing and circulation during the Renaissance helped to shape the identities of individual nations, and create different reading publics. Yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the forms in which works of Greek and Roman history were published in the first centuries of the handpress age, the relationship between the ideas contained within these texts and the books as material objects, and thus the precise nature of the changes they effected in early modern European culture and society. This article provides the groundwork for a reassessment of the place of ancient history in the early modern world. Using new, digital resources to reappraise existing scholarship, it offers a fresh evaluation of the publication of the ancient historians from the inception of print to 1600, revealing important differences that alter our understanding of particular authors, texts, and trends, and suggesting directions for further research. It also models the research possibilities of large-scale digital catalogues and databases, and highlights the possibilities (and pitfalls) of these resources.

Trade marks, newspapers and reading publics

ABSTRACTHow did the nineteenth-century trade marks registration system with its preference for distinctive trade marks accommodate Britain’s newspapers and reading publics, who seemed able to distinguish between newspapers despite their common descriptive names? In this article, it is argued that the situation presents another example of intellectual property law’s ‘negative spaces’, of creativity and innovation thriving in the absence of significant formal protection from intellectual property law. Moreover, it shows, yet again, the place of informal control in what is in other respects a formalised media industry sector. The historical analysis helps to explain the recent decision of an Irish judge that The Times and The Irish Times should continue to ‘co-exist peacefully’ in Ireland, with The Times permitted to launch a digital Times (Irish Edition) over the objection of the similarly named Irish Times, its nineteenth-century counterpart.

People Perception Towards Public Reading Room Service Of City Garden In Surabaya

Surabaya as Literacy City has been starting in National Education Day 2 May 2014 and also rising their features and facility like Public reading room, Library and Mobile Library. And we also Concern with some worst Realty about literacy System in Surabaya, such as had been Close some library in Shoping Center in Surabaya, like in Cito Mall, Royal Plaza and Kapas Krampung Plaza cause some problem in operasional System have causing other problem can disturb many achievement of Surabaya as Literacy City. We have should to continue it for another Public Reading Room in Surabaya can’t be like another Closed public reading room. And we must to minimalize it with Resources learning through the efforts of reviewing public reading room of the service as an essential element in an information centre. In order to show better utilization of the future for the public after the assessment is the primary focus of our study was to determine the extent to which the services at the general public reading room so that the future can be used as a positive response for public reading room. The method used is quantitative approach with the method of data collection in the form of an explanatory through observation, literature, and the distribution of questionnaires to the respondents in all four public reading room in park city of Surabaya. Overall from 4 to place our study showed that the frequency of public perception in total into the bad category based on indicators of Vincent theory who leads a balanced way of internal and external factors. It shows that the public reading room services that already exist is still considered very less than the maximum and the indication of the need for an increase in the promotion, facilities and innovation program for the future.

„Bijący talent dramatyczny”? Wokół emigracyjnej recepcji „Towarzysza Października” Kazimierza Wierzyńskiego

The paper is devoted to the one and only drama of Kazimierz Wierzyński (1894–1969) ‘Comrade October’, written in 1950, and released only in 1992. Its aim is to explain why it was not published immediately after the writing. The author attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of the creation of the work and to effort to publish and exhibit it, as well as to present the state of research. He show the ‘Comrade October’ against the background of emigratory dramaturgy and theater life, which serves to reflect on the political character of the drama and to analyze the reception of his public readings in èmigrè circles (Theatre ‘Pro Arte’ by Olga Żeromska, 1954).

Charles Dickens: An Introduction by Jenny Hartley

Reviewed by: Charles Dickens: An Introduction by Jenny Hartley Natalie B. Cole Jenny Hartley. Charles Dickens: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Pp. 151. $16.95; £10.99. Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens: An Introduction serves as a compact and effective first guide to novice readers of Dickens. Hartley successfully combines biographical and period context with short stretches of literary analysis, packed efficiently into the space of 151 pages. Starting with Oliver Twist's famous "more" scene, Hartley unpacks its various registers: from black comedy to mundane speech, to Poor Law regulation parlance, to the narrator's distanced observations. She also calls attention to the scene's "choreographed" performativity, Cruikshank's illustration, and Oliver Twist's biographical context as Dickens's "bandwagon was starting to roll" (3, 6). The sustained attention to a specific scene makes this one of the most successful chapters in the book. Hartley also underscores how Dickens, beginning with The Pickwick Papers, encourages readers to feel a personal connection to his imagined world and authorial persona, a distinguishing characteristic. This chapter also gives examples of Dickens's trademark "bifocalism" of high and low and other oppositions, Victorian stage versions of his novels, his cinematic thinking, and twentieth century film adaptations (11). Hartley's chapter 2, "Public and Private," provides an excellent overview of Dickens's biographical hallmarks from age twelve until his death, interspersed with examples of how key experiences influenced his fiction. Hartley comments that in David Copperfield Dickens's "innovation was to double track the perspectives of the child and the adult looking back" (21); reference to Charlotte Bronte's use of this method two years earlier would have provided an important literary context. Hartley treats Dickens's servitude in the blacking warehouse; his work as a parliamentary reporter; his infatuation with Maria Beadnell; his marriage to Catherine Hogarth and the death of sister-in-law Mary; his editorial work on Master Humphrey's Clock, Household Words and All the Year Round; his frequent speeches for charitable causes; his Urania Cottage project with Angela Burdett Coutts; his separation from Catherine; his affair with Ellen Ternan; and his public readings. Hartley underscores how Dickens thrived on deadlines and experienced a persistent physical and personal restlessness. [End Page 159] A valuable chapter follows on "Character and Plot" organized around five topics: "Names, Bodies, Clothes," "Peoples and Objects," "Externalized Psychology," "Angels and Villains" and "Improbable Plots." Hartley points out Dickens's highly connotative naming and his "never-dry well of names," as well as his propensity for "riffing on his own name" (44). She writes that "For Dickens, the body cannot help but signify," and neither can human clothing, a sort of "dress code" communicating class and identity to Dickens's readers (45, 48). Hartley's examples of boundary-breaking between human and thing, and how Dickens psychologizes character through external objects, are concise and useful. The section on "Angels and Villains" compresses the topic to a degree that suggests this section may deserve its own chapter. "Improbable Plots" offers an important literary context to narrative sprawl but does not mention the "providential aesthetic" so important to the period and its literature. London, "the supreme modern urban space," as it influenced the realism and key tropes of Dickens's writing, is the subject of the fourth chapter, "City Laureate" (66). Dickens's "pavement-level perspective," Hartley explains, stretches from Sketches by Boz to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens represents London with consistent geographical accuracy and uses tropes such as anonymity, coming to London, crowds, and the "Infernal Gulfs" of dens, prisons, kidnapping, and pollution (67, 81). A final section here, "Oases," takes a brief but engaging look at Dickens's "improvised bolt-holes, havens and bulwarks against […] "the sooty embrace" of the "murky fog" that wraps around the city's inhabitants when they leave their warm retreats (86; Our Mutual Friend III:1). Chapter 5, "Radical Dickens," focuses on Dickens as a social critic, and catalogues, from Sketches to Great Expectations, Victorian social causes about which Dickens wrote or gave speeches. Although it misses an opportunity to discuss the limitations and successes of Dickens as a Victorian agent of change, "Radical Dickens" examines how Dickens simultaneously...

Fuller, the Dial, the Tribune, and Periodical Print Culture

Fuller, the Dial, the Tribune, and Periodical Print Culture Brigitte Bailey (bio) In discussing Margaret Fuller's transition from an editor of the Dial to a columnist for the New-York Tribune, Larry Reynolds notes that the Transcendentalist journal "grew out of the coterie publishing practices" of Fuller and her friends, out of the "portfolios" of personal writings they shared. The "rich intertextuality" of their writings and of the ensuing issues of the Dial that Fuller edited gave way, Reynolds adds, to the less allusive language that she developed to address the broadly national "imagined audience" of the Tribune.1 This stylistic shift, as Fuller moved from a quarterly focused on "Literature, Philosophy, and Religion" (the Dial's subtitle) to a daily newspaper, accompanied a more complex change in Fuller's understanding of periodicals and their reading publics in the decade of the emergence of modern periodical print culture. From the first issue of the Dial, Fuller is at work not only contributing to but also theorizing periodicals. In "A Short Essay on Critics" she mentions the popular "magazine," "journals," and "the daily paper," even as she is especially concerned to critique the quarterly "reviews," whose "partisan spirit" and "dictator[ial]" reviewers have "brought them into disrepute." However, her overview of "periodical writing" and criticism also argues that "their golden age cannot be quite passed. They afford too convenient a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge; they are too natural a feature of our time to have done all their work yet. Surely they may be redeemed from their abuses, they may be turned to their true uses."2 This essay will chart Fuller's evolving sense of the "true uses" of periodicals in the 1840s. Her Dial essay, unsurprisingly, defines the role of the critic writing for periodicals in Transcendentalist terms: the ideal critic is able to "enter into the nature" of a writer and "his work" and judge it by its aims but also "to put that aim in its place, and … estimate its relations … [because he] perceives the analogies of the universe, and how they are regulated by an absolute, invariable principle."3 But when Fuller arrived in New York as the "Star" critic of Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, she entered into a quite different milieu, where daily newspapers (what Fuller calls "the paper wings of every day")4 and other urban print ephemera were surging in circulation and when the [End Page 89] city was embarking on the economic boom that, as David Scobey has shown, transformed it into the national commercial metropolis—and that helped to create this efflorescence of textual matter.5 David Henkin has argued that "city reading" was "promiscuous read[ing]"; by "inducing … countless and disjointed acts of browsing," the textual ephemera "of everyday city life cultivated reading subjects" who were modern, consumerist, and anonymous:6 in other words, a self at odds with the values of Fuller's ideal critic in the Dial. In a much-quoted letter to James Freeman Clarke, Fuller defines her journalism at the Tribune as part of the "great work of mutual education"; however, in addition to her emphasis on its dialogic function, Fuller also describes her participation in newspaper work in New York as being "afloat in mid-stream," not exploring "the depths" but engaging broadly (in "the shallows") "all the signs of life."7 Reading Fuller's columns in the context of this urban textual world and in the "shallows" of modern life reveals her adaptation to the kinds of print culture that recorded and voiced this emergent world. As the Tribune's first-page critic, Fuller's job, in many ways, was to review the new flood of printed material at the advent of the era of the "industrial book," as the editors of the History of the Book in America call the period beginning in 1840.8 Given recent research into the history of periodicals in this era of their rapid growth, we can now see Fuller's position more clearly as someone hired both to mediate and to help produce this emergent world of modern print culture, and we can see how she situates herself rhetorically...

Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism by Loretta M. Gaffney

Reviewed by: Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism by Loretta M. Gaffney Nadia Clifton (bio) Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism. By Loretta M. Gaffney. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. In this book, Loretta M. Gaffney explores young adult literature as a cultural and political phenomenon. By considering critiques and defenses of this literature and detailing the history and importance of librarians in shaping its canon, Gaffney jumps into a lively and strongly opinionated discussion on the relevance, importance, and role of young adult literature in the lives of teenagers. Each chapter includes historical background to bring the reader into the long conversation about adolescent literature, providing context for its ongoing discussion. By exploring the politics and power relationships in the act of reading, Gaffney puts forward a vision of these texts’ extensive impact. As she writes, “YA Literature is not simply a collection of books: it is an idea about the value of youthful perspectives, the importance of forging identities and communities, and the power and possibility of public reading” (54). [End Page 118] In the introductory chapter, Gaffney lays the groundwork for productive ways of reading young adult novels. First, she defines adolescent literature in a way that goes beyond the age of protagonist or reader. She encourages a focus on literature that is more political, literature with young protagonists that explores and critiques society as well as books focused on the teenage perspective of what she calls “the eternal present,” a description of the teenager’s ability to “live in the heat of the moment” (6; orig. emphasis). She continues by outlining the history of the form, its foundational novels, and its slow yet steady rise in academia. Finally, she introduces the three main concepts that she proposes should be used for reading adolescent literature and its criticism: aesthetics, pedagogy, and pleasure. Each of these reading strategies is given its own space for further exploration in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapter 2 addresses the intended audience of adolescent literature: teenagers. The reigning narrative is that teens are “reluctant” readers. Concern about youth reading, especially recreational reading, is not new, dating back at least to the dime novels of the nineteenth century. The perpetuation of this narrative, however, leads to an image of teenage readers that Gaffney argues is limiting. Since teens engage in a combination of print and digital literacies, she advocates that a new definition of reading be constructed and applied when observing teen reading practices today. This combination of print and digital literacies creates a situation where rather than simply being passive consumers of information, adolescent readers are also active creators, especially online. Traditional stereotypes and theories influence how we construct these readers, and we often forget to take them at face value. A qualitative analysis is more productive than a quantitative one, especially the realization that they read for pleasure rather than information. We must also remember to take into account the actual reading practices of teenagers, not those that we impose upon them. Chapter 3 discusses aesthetics, the first of Gaffney’s three strategies for reading young adult literature. A historical context reveals that librarians were the first group to insist on books for young people that were not just pedagogically useful, but aesthetically pleasing as well. In this way, librarians play an integral part in creating and growing the adolescent literary canon. This gatekeeper role, however, is criticized by those who argue about the merits of realistic versus fantasy literature within the canon. Today, Gaffney calls for an interrogation of the basis of defense for books: “If we elect to use literary quality or the canon as an answer to critics, the criteria for determining such quality must not go unexamined” (50). She also claims a role for librarians as the defenders of teens’ freedom to read. Although librarians must choose books that embody both literary quality and appeal, they also tend to recognize the importance of reader choice because the reader is the one who makes meaning from the text. Chapter 4 examines Gaffney’s second strategy, pedagogy, by addressing bibliotherapy and the problem novel. [End Page 119] Young adult literature tends to be viewed as books that...

Diary Prose by M. Tsvetaeva: The Author’s Concept and Genre Peculiarities

This article analyses the key features of prose written by a poet from the point of view of correlation between the traditions of the genre and the individual features of the author’s style typical of Marina Tsvetaeva’s diaries. The article refers to key works on literature and linguistics devoted to the poet’s heritage. The material of the analysis is M. Tsvetaeva’s diary prose written between 1917 and 1920 in Moscow (including About Love , About Germany , Attic Writings , Excerpts from the Book Earthly Signs , About Gratitude ). The article defines traditional features typical of Tsvetaeva’s diary prose such as the dating (references to specific dates important to Tsvetaeva), the primacy of the author’s subjectivity, which dictates the choice of the material; the citing of other people’s speech and recreation of dialogues, and, ultimately, the fragmentariness of the narrative. Moreover, the author singles out features inherent only in Tsvetaeva’s diary prose. They are the aphoristic character of statements (the use of overly artistic forms of expression of the author’s ideas, which are due to the implicit presence of the reader), graphic elements, such as lines that separate one thought from another, thematic divisions of diary entries (titles), the category of the “essential” and the correlation between the “essence” and “realisation”. The analysis demonstrates that in most cases, M. Tsvetaeva’s diary prose has the status of an artistically finished statement, which is not characteristic of the genre and which made it possible for the works to be published during the poet’s life. The author consciously creates a text intended for public reading and publication.

This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly

Reviewed by: This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly Beth Miller Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, 300 pp. Debjani Ganguly's new book This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form beautifully connects the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to their contemporary equivalent, the humanitarianism of the post-1989 global novel. In her analysis, these texts have a unique desire and responsibility to bring together global networks of world, war, and witness. Ganguly demonstrates how the sentimental works from the Romantic period, unconvincing in the following centuries, reenter the world stage with the change in zeitgeist following the end of the Cold War through a specific focus on ekphrasis. Her argument details how the hypervisual and multimedia culture rising to prominence alongside a new era of global warfare has intensified an iteration of the Romantic imagination (137). Ganguly's primary argument uses ekphrasis to explore the role of witness and witnessing in the contemporary novel, especially with the outbreak of global war and terror networks. Ganguly divides her text into three sections: World, War, and Witness. In "World," through the image of the collage, she critically reimagines the global novel as "a formal and semantic construct through which the human imagination as well as the humanitarian imagination seeks to make sense of and sensitize our reading publics to the worlds of wars and violence that have become pervasive in our era" (85). Ganguly's analysis commences with David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, a novel spanning the globe and demonstrating the intricate ripples felt personally, corporately or communally, and nationally from individual's decisions in our increasingly interconnected present. The power of witnessing on a global scale, specifically the inescapability of graphic violence, comes into sharper clarity in Ganguly's analysis of Salman Rushdie after 1989. Her close reading of Shalimar the Clown individualizes as well as worlds Rushdie's transition from a postcolonial to a global author in his shift to a "world perspective" of history's relationship to the present, "reckon[ing] with planetary convergence" as opposed to the postcolonial focus on "disjunctive temporalities," in other words, "a contemporality that is global" (122). Her second section, "War," builds on the scholarly foundation of the quotidian [End Page 385] experience of war to focus on humanitarian responses to the concentration of images in our global culture intensified by the Web. Adding to her existing literary timeline, Ganguly details the transformation in humanitarian thought between the end of WWII and human rights movements of the 1960s to the "age of witnessing" and "hypermediated humanitarianism" in the early twenty-first century especially (140). Romantic-era photography, specifically of the Napoleonic wars, brought war into the home for the first time. This intimacy transformed the relational perception between war and the nation, making future literary movements dependent on reactions to warfare; in the same vein, "the global wars since the end of the cold war and the iconic mediatization of 9/11 overwhelmingly constitute the horizon of literary theorizations in our global era" (152). Her analysis of this image-saturated environment focalizes around Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers and Don DeLillo's Falling Man, both of which strive to make sense of the iconography of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Ganguly's third section, "Witness," flips conceptions of the "cultural chasm" between postcolonial and Western worlds; she argues instead that "the saturations and reinflections of witnessing violence across multiple media … need to be read explicitly as products of both postcolonial planetary reconfigurations and the concomitant effects of hypermediation in our information era" (178). Analyses of Anil's Ghost and Orpheus Lost form the argument of her final section. Anil's Ghost "makes legible" the witnessing process, complicated by connecting the personal feeling of loss to the historical fact of atrocity by following Anil as she discovers "the necessity and impossibility of finding the truth about extreme human violence" in the extra-judicial killings in Sri Lanka between 1988–90 (193). Ganguly engages in global mapping in her analysis as well, connecting Ondaatje and Sri Lanka to Spiegel...

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

I ritorni di Magwitch. Adattamenti, spin-off, riscritture sul forzato dickensiano

Great Expectations is probably the most adapted and rewritten work of the Dickensian literary production. Since the author’s adaptation for his public readings, it was clear that the narration was not focused on the love story between Pip and Estella, but on the relationship between the orphan and the convict, his second father. In the last decades numerous transpositions have confirmed that Magwitch, despite his diegetic marginality, is the classic’s most magnetic character: The Boy and the Convict by Aylott (1909), Great Expectations: The Untold Story by Burstall (1987), Magwitch by Noonan (1982), Jack Maggs by Carey (1997), the recent spin-off by Supple, Magwitch (2012), and a self-published trilogy by Lester (2010-2011) feature Magwitch as a main character, to redeem him and to give him a better destiny than Dickens did. After an overview of the reasons for his reception, and a section on the transposing strategies used by rewritings and adaptations, this paper aims at showing the new attention to the theme of fatherhood or parenthood to which this character is strictly related. In particular, keeping in mind Sadrin’s analysis of Great Expectations in terms of the “family romance”, these works shed light on the metaphorical and metonymical meaning of Magwitch’s relationship with Britain and Australia.

THE METATEXTS OF 1 AND 2 MACCABEES

The physical placement of Maccabees within translations provides important evidence concerning the translators’ views of the book and its relation to other parts of the canon. Some of the translations include a preface which explicitly indicates the status of Maccabees with respect to the remainder of the canon of Scripture and its proper use both for public reading and ecclesiastical doctrine. In addition, some translations include introductions to Maccabees, which further discuss the status and role of Maccabees within the canon. Finally, the metatextual evidence of marginal notes will be used to indicate interpretive issues concerning the text of Maccabees.

Paranormal belief and errors of probabilistic reasoning: The role of constituent conditional relatedness in believers' susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy.

The present study examines the extent to which stronger belief in either extrasensory perception, psychokinesis or life-after-death is associated with a proneness to making conjunction errors (CEs). One hundred and sixty members of the UK public read eight hypothetical scenarios and for each estimated the likelihood that two constituent events alone plus their conjunction would occur. The impact of paranormal belief plus constituents' conditional relatedness type, estimates of the subjectively less likely and more likely constituents plus relevant interaction terms tested via three Generalized Linear Mixed Models. General qualification levels were controlled for. As expected, stronger PK beliefs and depiction of a positively conditionally related (verses conditionally unrelated) constituent pairs predicted higher CE generation. ESP and LAD beliefs had no impact with, surprisingly, higher estimates of the less likely constituent predicting fewer - not more - CEs. Theoretical implications, methodological issues and ideas for future research are discussed.

Integrating the view of the public into the formal legislative process: public reading stage in the UK House of Commons

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen increasing calls to integrate the public's voice into the parliamentary process. This article examines the impact of public reading stage (PRS) on the UK Parliament's scrutiny of a bill. A new stage of the legislative process piloted by the House of Commons in February 2013, PRS invited the public to comment on a bill undergoing parliamentary scrutiny (the Children and Families Bill). The PRS was designed to encourage members of the public to participate in the scrutiny of legislation through a specially designed forum on parliament's website. Over 1000 comments were submitted. Drawing on a content analysis of the comments given by the public to the bill, complemented by interviews with members of parliament, key officials and PRS participants, it was found that although the public reading stage had an impressive response, it failed to make much of a tangible impact on the parliamentary scrutiny of the bill. This was largely due to the choice of bill being used for the pilot and its lack of appropriate integration into the formal legislative process.

British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates. Edited by Mark Canuel. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xxi+639.

<i>British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates</i>. Edited by Mark Canuel. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xxi+639.