Reading Publics

Reading Publics PDF Author: Tom Glynn
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823262650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
On May 11, 1911, the New York Public Library opened its “marble palace for book lovers” on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This was the city’s first public library in the modern sense, a tax-supported, circulating collection free to every citizen. Since before the Revolution, however, New York’s reading publics had access to a range of “public libraries” as the term was understood by contemporaries. In its most basic sense a public library in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries simply meant a shared collection of books that was available to the general public and promoted the public good. From the founding in 1754 of the New York Society Library up to 1911, public libraries took a variety of forms. Some of them were free, charitable institutions, while others required a membership or an annual subscription. Some, such as the Biblical Library of the American Bible Society, were highly specialized; others, like the Astor Library, developed extensive, inclusive collections. What all the public libraries of this period had in common, at least ostensibly, was the conviction that good books helped ensure a productive, virtuous, orderly republic—that good reading promoted the public good. Tom Glynn’s vivid, deeply researched history of New York City’s public libraries over the course of more than a century and a half illuminates how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Reading Publics examines how books and reading helped construct social identities and how print functioned within and across groups, including but not limited to socioeconomic classes. The author offers an accessible while scholarly exploration of how republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of “public” and “private,” and the debate over fiction influenced the development and character of New York City’s public libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reading Publics is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City that firmly places the city’s early public libraries within the history of reading and print culture in the United States.

Reading Publics

Reading Publics PDF Author: Tom Glynn
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823262650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
On May 11, 1911, the New York Public Library opened its “marble palace for book lovers” on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This was the city’s first public library in the modern sense, a tax-supported, circulating collection free to every citizen. Since before the Revolution, however, New York’s reading publics had access to a range of “public libraries” as the term was understood by contemporaries. In its most basic sense a public library in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries simply meant a shared collection of books that was available to the general public and promoted the public good. From the founding in 1754 of the New York Society Library up to 1911, public libraries took a variety of forms. Some of them were free, charitable institutions, while others required a membership or an annual subscription. Some, such as the Biblical Library of the American Bible Society, were highly specialized; others, like the Astor Library, developed extensive, inclusive collections. What all the public libraries of this period had in common, at least ostensibly, was the conviction that good books helped ensure a productive, virtuous, orderly republic—that good reading promoted the public good. Tom Glynn’s vivid, deeply researched history of New York City’s public libraries over the course of more than a century and a half illuminates how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Reading Publics examines how books and reading helped construct social identities and how print functioned within and across groups, including but not limited to socioeconomic classes. The author offers an accessible while scholarly exploration of how republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of “public” and “private,” and the debate over fiction influenced the development and character of New York City’s public libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reading Publics is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City that firmly places the city’s early public libraries within the history of reading and print culture in the United States.

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public PDF Author: Professor Daniel Hannah
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472401336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers original readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere’s shifting forms.

The Genome Incorporated

The Genome Incorporated PDF Author: Kate O'Riordan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317030699
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
The Genome Incorporated examines the proliferation of human genomics across contemporary media cultures. It explores questions about what it means for a technoscience to thoroughly saturate everyday life, and places the interrogation of the science/media relationship at the heart of this enquiry. The book develops a number of case studies in the mediation and consumption of genomics, including: the emergence of new direct-to-the-consumer bioinformatics companies; the mundane propagation of testing and genetic information through lifestyle television programming; and public and private engagements with art and science institutions and events. Through these novel sites, this book examines the proliferating circuits of production and consumption of genetic information and theorizes this as a process of incorporation. Its wide-ranging case studies ensure its appeal to readers across the social sciences.

The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope

The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope PDF Author: Joel Faflak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442665750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope brings together a number of winners of the Polanyi Prize in Literature – a group whose research constitutes a diversity of methodological approaches to the study of culture – to examine the rich but often troubled association between the concepts of the public, the intellectual (both the person and the condition), culture, and hope. The contributors probe the influence of intellectual life on the public sphere by reflecting on, analyzing, and re-imagining social and cultural identity. The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope reflects on the challenging and often vexed work of intellectualism within the public sphere by exploring how cultural materials – from foundational Enlightenment writings to contemporary, populist media spectacles – frame intellectual debates within the clear and ever-present gaze of the public writ large. These serve to illuminate how past cultures can shed light on present and future issues, as well as how current debates can reframe our approaches to older subjects.

The Handbook of Media Audiences

The Handbook of Media Audiences PDF Author: Virginia Nightingale
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444340506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the complexity and diversity of audience studies in the advent of digital media. Details the study of audiences and how it is changing in relation to digital media Recognizes and appreciates valuable traditional approaches and identifies how they can be applied to, and evolve with, the changing media world Offers diverse perspectives from which being an audience, theorizing audiences, researching audiences, and doing audience research are approached today Argues that the field works best by identifying particular 'audience problems' and applying the best theories and research methods available to solving them Includes contributions from some of the most outstanding international scholars in the field

Beyond the Screen

Beyond the Screen PDF Author: Marta Braun
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969138
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This scholarly anthology presents a new framework for understanding early cinema through its usage outside the realm of entertainment. From its earliest origins until the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema provided widespread access to remote parts of the globe and immediate reports on important events. Reaching beyond the nickelodeon theatres, cinema became part of numerous institutions, from churches and schools to department stores and charitable organizations. Then, in 1915, the Supreme Court declared moviemaking a “busines, pure and simple,” entrenching the film industry’s role as a producer of “harmless entertainment.” In Beyond the Screen, contributors shed light on how pre-1915 cinema defined itself through institutional interconnections and publics interested in science, education, religious uplift, labor organizing, and more.

Press and Public

Press and Public PDF Author: Leo Bogart
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000149005
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This book reviews the challenges that face American newspapers at the end of the 1980s, after a decade of circulation losses for many dailies and several decades of accelerating social change. It describes how content of newspapers is changing in the context of a discussion of the nature of news.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6, 1830–1914

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6, 1830–1914 PDF Author: David McKitterick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131617588X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 940

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Book Description
The years 1830–1914 witnessed a revolution in the manufacture and use of books as great as that in the fifteenth century. Using new technology in printing, paper-making and binding, publishers worked with authors and illustrators to meet ever-growing and more varied demands from a population seeking books at all price levels. The essays by leading book historians in this volume show how books became cheap, how publishers used the magazine and newspaper markets to extend their influence, and how book ownership became universal for the first time. The fullest account ever published of the nineteenth-century revolution in printing, publishing and bookselling, this volume brings The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain up to a point when the world of books took on a recognisably modern form.

Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print PDF Author: Bartholomew Brinkman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421421356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
How scrapbooking, book collecting, and other ways of handling print media informed modernist poetry. In Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print, Bartholomew Brinkman argues that an emerging mass print culture conditioned the production, reception, and institutionalization of poetic modernism from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century—with lasting implications for the poetry and media landscape. Drawing upon extensive archival research in the United States and Britain, Brinkman demonstrates that a variety of print collecting practices—including the anthology, the periodical, the collage poem, volumes of selected and collected poems, and the modern poetry archive—helped structure key formal and institutional sites of poetic modernism. Brinkman focuses on the generative role of book collecting practices and the negotiation of print ephemera in scrapbooks. He also traces the evolution of the modern poetry archive as a particular case of the mid-twentieth-century rise of literary archives and identifies parallels between the beginning of mass print culture at the end of the nineteenth century and the growth of digital culture today. Advocating for a transatlantic modernism that stretches roughly from 1880 to 1960—one that incorporates both popular and canonical poets—Brinkman successfully extends the geographical, historical, and vertical dimensions of modernist studies. Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print will appeal not only to scholars and students of literary modernism, modern periodical studies, book history, print culture, media studies, history, art history, and museum studies but also to librarians, archivists, museum curators, and information science professionals.

Audience Analysis

Audience Analysis PDF Author: Denis McQuail
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761910022
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
`The book is essentially for a student of mass communication or may be of interest to the communications expert into communications reserach, theory or operations research. The author addresses a specific "audience" and does it to perfection with a simple very readable presentation' - The Economic TimesDenis McQuail provides a coherent and succinct account of the concept of `media audience' in terms of its history and its place in present-day media theory and research. McQuail describes and explains the main types of audience and the main traditions and fields of audience research.Audience Analysis explains the contrast between social scientific and humanistic approaches and gives due weight to the view `from the audience' as well as the view `from the media'. McQuail summarizes key research findings and assesses the impact of new media developments, especially transnationalization and new interactive technology. The book concludes with an evaluation of the continued relevance of the audience concept under conditions of rapid media change. Audience Analysis provides both an overview of past research and a guide to current thinking.