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Book SynopsisThis is the first-ever book length study of one of the most important and constantly innovative 19th century book and periodical publishers. The mysterious and often elusive but enormously influential Henry Colburn (c.1784 – 16 August 1855) was the pre-eminent publisher of ‘silver-fork’ novels, and of many influential new writers.Colburn’s main claim to rehabilitation are his troop of 'name' authors: Lady Morgan, Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Captain Marryat, G.P.R James, Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, Mrs. Catherine Gore, Mrs. Caroline Norton, Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Richard Cobbold, R. S. Surtees. Many would not have had a start in the careers they later enjoyed were it not for Colburn.This is a lively, and important new work on early 19th-century publishing and the patterns for the century which Colburn set. It sketches intantalizing outlines the Regency, early nineteenth-century and Victorian book trades – and the consequences of Colburn’s impact on those worlds. In addition, the work centres on Colburn’s most celebrated authors. The book – which is well illustrated - contains the first catalogue of Colburn’s publications.Thus far, literary and publishing history have drawn a formidable charge sheet against Henry Colburn. In personal pedigree he is slandered as a ‘guttersnipe’, or a ‘royal bastard’. In Disraeli’s pungent description he was a publishing ‘bawd’, engaged in wholesale literary prostitution. A very bad thing. And yet this publishing Barabbas can be argued to have been innovative and a force for constructive change in the rapidly evolving book trade and---paradoxically---a man of taste.Various rumours circulated that he was either a bastard of the Duke of York or of Lord Landsdowne. Date uncertain. He liked to weave illustrious (typically mendacious) pedigrees for himself as much as for his dubiously aristocratic purveyors of silver forkery.What, precisely, did Colburn do that should raise his reputation and make us see him as a good thing? In the largest sense he demonstrated, by example and practice, the need for consolidation between hitherto dismembered arms of the London book world. Beginning his career at apprentice level in the London West End circulating-library business he went on, having learned at the counter what the customer wanted, to become the undisputed market leader in the publication of three-volume novels and (sub-Murray) travel books.The three-decker went on to become the foundation-stone of the ‘Leviathan’ library system (Mudie’s and Smith’s) and created a seventy-year stability in the publishing, distribution and reception of English fiction. In 1814 Colburn founded the New Monthly Magazine. In 1817, he set up England’s first serious weekly review, the Literary Gazette. In 1828 he helped found the Athenaeum (distant parent of today's New Statesman). His behaviour, as a magazine proprietor and editor at large was typically outrageous. But the link he forged between higher journalism and literature was momentous.

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Book SynopsisThere is no journal with a livelier and richer history than The Spectator. As well as being the world’s oldest current affairs magazine, none has been closer to spheres of power and influence in Britain. Since its first appearance in 1828, during the dying days of the Georgian era, The Spectator has been ready to spar – with the Tories and their Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, with a corrupt political system, and with the lacklustre literary world of the day. Over the subsequent 54 Prime Ministers, The Spectator has not just watched the world go by but has waded into the fray: it has campaigned on consistently liberal lines, fighting for voters’ rights, free trade, the free press and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, while offering open-minded criticism of every modern taboo and orthodoxy. 10,000 Not Out marks the magazine’s 10,000th issue by recounting the turbulent and tortuous tale of its history, of 192 years chock-full of crises and campaigns, of literary flair and barbed wit. Eight chapters chart the evolution of the title – from radical weekly newspaper, to moralising Victorian guardian, to wartime watchdog, to satirical magazine, to High-Tory counsellor, to the irreverent but influential Spectator of the twenty-first century. The book weaves together copious quotations from the magazine’s unparalleled archive, the contemporary press, private letters and staff anecdote.Trade Review"Butterfield's highly readable romp through its history reminds members of The Spectator club—it has always had a very clubby feeling—of editorial triumphs and disasters, commercial horrors and some remarkable luck." * Literary Review *"Few journals have cut such a dash through history and culture as The Spectator, and none have lasted as long. David Butterfield has immersed himself to excellent effect in the British magazine’s billion-word digitized archives, paying tribute to a unique institution as influential now as at any time in its 10,000 issue history. . . . Butterfield’s book demonstrates that [The Spectator] has simultaneously helped make and mirror the British psyche, and to read it is not just to read the mind of the British right, but also the heart of a complex country." * Chronicles *"The Spectator: the greatest magazine in the English language." -- Prime Minister Boris Johnson"A gem of a book—in the hands of a superb writer. Butterfield’s attention to detail is fabulous, his storytelling magnificent and his playful affection for these often larger than life characters makes them leap off the page. A delight." -- Emily Maitlis, Newsnight (UK)"More than individually surprising discoveries about people and their strange ways, this history presents an intriguing moving picture of life inside Britain’s oldest weekly." -- Christopher Howse, Daily Telegraph (UK)"A rich and beautifully crafted chronicle, often hilarious and always informative." -- A. N. Wilson, author of Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy"The Spectator has always had its own mind—and its own life. David Butterfield has written a first-class biography of that life: the highs and lows, the feuds and affairs, the best jokes, the worst decisions—it's a treasure trove. A brilliantly readable history of the magazine, its life and its times." -- Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisThis full color book details fifty iconic stories in the twenty-five year history of the Hub City Writers Project, founded in 1995 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Each includes a double page illustrated spread. The book features short essays by local and regional writers about moments like the Lawson’s Fork Festival in 2000, the Out Loud campaign against academic censorship, all the way to the introduction of our signature event, Delicious Reads. This book celebrates the first twenty-five years and details how the Hub City Writers Project grew from an idea hatched in a downtown coffee shop among three local writers to now being one of the South’s most robust literary organizations.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisEvelina, the first novel by Frances Burney, published in 1778, enjoys lasting popularity among the reading public. Tracing its publication history through 174 editions, adaptations, and reprints, many of them newly discovered and identified, this book demonstrates how the novel’s material embodiment in the form of the printed book has been reshaped by its publishers, recasting its content for new generations of readers. Four main chapters vividly describe how during 240 years, Evelina, a popular novel of manners, metamorphosed without any significant alterations to its text into a Regency “rambling” text, a romantic novel for “lecteurs délicats,” a cheap imprint for circulating libraries, a yellow-back, a book with a certain aesthetic cachet, a Christmas gift-book, finally becoming an integral part of the established literary canon in annotated scholarly editions. This book also focuses on the remodelling and transformation of the paratext in this novel, written by a woman author, by the heavily male-dominated publishing industry. Shorter Entr’acte sections discuss and describe alterations in the forms of Burney’s name and the title of her work, the omission and renaming of her authorial prefaces, and the redeployment of the publisher’s prefatorial apparatus to support particular editions throughout almost two-and-a-half centuries of the novel’s existence. Illustrated with reproductions of covers, frontispieces, and title pages, the book also provides an illuminating insight into the role of Evelina’s visual representation in its history as a marketable commodity, highlighting the existence of editions targeting various segments of the book market: from the upper-middle-class to mass-readership. The first comprehensive and fully updated bibliography of English and translated editions, adaptations, and reprints of Evelina published in 13 languages and scripts appears in an appendix.Table of ContentsChapter 1: Beginnings: Published Wide and Often.- Chapter 2: Books for All Tastes and Wallets.- Chapter 3: Entering the Literary Canon.- Chapter 4: Evelina: The Life in Print.- Chapter 5: Conclusion.- Coda: Digital Afterlife.

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Book SynopsisThis book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press. In bringing to light her embodied literary processes, from drafting and composition to hand-printing and binding, this study foregrounds the interactions between Woolf's modernist experimentation and the visual and material aspects of her printed works. By drawing on the field of print culture, as well as the materialist turn in Woolf scholarship, it explores how her experience in print, book-design and publishing underlines her experimental writing, and how her literary texts are conditioned by the context of their production. This book, therefore, provides new ways of reading Woolf's modernism in the context of twentieth-century print, material, and visual cultures. By suggesting that Woolf's work at the Hogarth Press sensitized her to the significant role the visual aspects of a text play in its system of representation, it also considers the extent to which materiality informs both her work, as well as her engagement with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, which often exaggerate the distinction between visual and verbal modes of expression.Table of ContentsPart I: Materiality.1. Introduction: Writing, Materiality, and Aesthetics.2. Conversations in Colour and Ink: Feminist Aesthetics in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and Kew Gardens.3. ‘Fill in the sketch as you like’: Developing the Fragmentary Form of Jacob’s Room.4. ‘The cold raw edge of one’s relinquished pages’: Reading Mrs Dalloway as a Palimpsest.Part II. Aesthetics.5. Drafting Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe: Feminist Aesthetics in the Manuscript of To the Lighthouse.6. ‘A succession of semblances’: Form and Feminism in The Waves.7. ‘Getting the past to shadow this broken surface’: Time, Materiality, and Aesthetics.

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Book SynopsisThis book does what few other works have done: it examines the role media have played in the larger political, economic and social transformations in the post communist space. An international group of scholars from various disciplines explore the complex relations between media, society, and the state in this region over the past twenty years, and present theoretical arguments that challenge dominant views. They scrutinize changes in the public sphere as well as the media itself, its role, format, agenda and quality in the context of changing values and shifting power relationships.Trade Review«Rich both conceptually and empirically, this volume is an authoritative stocktaking of relations between media, political and business elites since the collapse of communism in Russia and a half dozen other countries.» (John Higley, Professor of Government and Sociology, University of Austin at Texas, USA, Chair, IPSA Research Committee on Political Elites)Table of ContentsContents: Marta Dyczok: Introduction – Marta Dyczok: Do the Media Matter? Focus on Ukraine – Oxana Gaman-Golutvina: Contradictions between Freedom and Development: Historical and Contemporary Dimensions (the Russian Case) – Stefan Jarolimek: In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails. Plurality, the Public Sphere and the Transformation of Press Journalism in Belarus – Inta Brikše: Development of a Public Sphere: Journalistic Freedom and Media Accountability in Latvia – Boris Dubin: Russia, the West and «The Special Path». Popular Attitudes to Other Countries – Oleg Manaev: Belarus on the ‘Huntington Line’: The Role of Media (Devoted to the Memory of Samuel Huntington) – Masha Lipman: The Russian Media Scene: Industrial Rise and Industrial Decline – Robert Austin: Less is More: Towards a Sustainable and Reliable Media in Albania – Tamara Berekashivli: Trends in Georgia’s Mass Media after the ‘Rose Revolution’ – Vicken Cheterian: Coloured Revolutions and the Media: Where is the Scoop? – Oxana Gaman-Golutvina: Conclusions. Media and Democracy in Transformation Design.

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Book SynopsisChina has lived with the Internet for nearly two decades. Will increased Internet use, with new possibilities to share information and discuss news and politics, lead to democracy, or will it to the contrary sustain a nationalist supported authoritarianism that may eventually contest the global information order? This book takes stock of the ongoing tug of war between state power and civil society on and off the Internet, a phenomenon that is fast becoming the centerpiece in the Chinese Communist Party’s struggle to stay in power indefinitely. It interrogates the dynamics of this enduring contestation, before democracy, by following how Chinese society travels from getting access to the Internet to our time having the world’s largest Internet population. Pursuing the rationale of Internet regulation, the rise of the Chinese blogosphere and citizen journalism, Internet irony, online propaganda, the relation between state and popular nationalism, and finally the role of social media to bring about China’s democratization, this book offers a fresh and provocative perspective on the arguable role of media technologies in the process of democratization, by applying social norm theory to illuminate the competition between the Party-state norm and the youth/subaltern norm in Chinese media and society.Trade Review«Insightful and timely, this book offers a rich analysis that brings the scholarship on Internet and democracy in China to a new level of holistic understanding. Drawing from solid empirical data and key historical knowledge, Dr. Lagerkvist connects classic political theory with China’s complex social reality, challenging conventional wisdom about Chinese authorities, political culture, and media system reform. Anyone interested in China’s media landscape and her democratic future should read this book.» (Jack Linchuan Qiu, Ph.D. Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) «Johan Lagerkvist has produced the most comprehensive treatment of the internet in China we’ve yet seen. He examines topics as varied as state regulation, blogging, citizen journalism and online irony and nationalism, and links careful empirical research to evolving state, societal and business norms and the character of China’s regime. A welcome addition to a fast-growing literature, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the mass media and political communication in China.» (Kevin J. O’Brien, Alann P. Bedford Professor of Asian Studies and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley) «After the Internet provides an authoritative guide to the huge, cantankerous, controlled, unruly, ever-surprising world of over 400 million Internet users in China. From the Chinese blogosphere to government efforts to impose harmony, from Party ideotainment to irrepressible spoofing (egao) and the political irreverence of the «grass mud horse» phenomenon, to the shapes of government vs. popular nationalism, and even the recent Google imbroglio, Lagervist gives an insightful account based on wide-ranging research and intelligent engagement with current scholarship. This will be the standard guide to understanding the Chinese Internet for years to come.» (Timothy Cheek, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia) «(...) Johan Lagerkvist should be congratulated on producing this comprehensive and useful analysis of China’s Internet landscape. This timely book addresses the wide range of critical issues pertaining to the democratic implications of Internet development in China, and deserves to be widely read by anyone concerned about changes in Chinese politics, society, and culture today.» (Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, International Journal of China Studies) «Lagerkvist offers a timely and rich analysis on the role of the Internet in China’s democratization process. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in China’s media landscape and her democratic future.» (Weiwei Zhang, International Journal of Communication 6, 2012)Table of ContentsContents: Internet regulation and the youth/subaltern norm – In blogs they trust? – And the baton passes to … citizen journalism – Weapons of harmony and irony – Old propaganda becomes ideotainment – A nationalistic information sphere – The Google mirage: global business norms versus Internet sovereignty – Norms endgame and breakthrough.

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Book SynopsisVilna (Polish Wilno), modern Vilnius and capital of Lithuania, was the traditional spiritual and intellectual centre of Jewish thought in the Russian Empire. It was often referred to as the Jerusalem of Lithuania', a term that has now come to stand for the lost world of Jewish life in Europe. Most people today learned what they know about this Vilna from autobiographies or personal memoirs. This book takes a more objective look at how Vilna became a uniquely important centre of the Jewish press. In particular it follows the development of the Jewish press within the context of modernising Imperial Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Vilna is revealed as an important centre for the Jewish Socialist movement, the Bund, towards the turn of the nineteenth century and in the years running up to the 1905 Revolution. Bundist journalism is discovered to be the sponsor of a Jewish cultural ideology called Yiddishism.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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