Publish the Picture at Your Peril: Visual Ideas and the Commercial Apparatus of Life Magazine

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Schwartz

AbstractIn the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine’s business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life’s publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine’s images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Three letters from the Sheina Marshall archive at the former University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) reveal the pivotal significance of Sheina Marshall's father, Dr John Nairn Marshall, behind the scheme planned by Glasgow University's Regius Professor of Zoology, John Graham Kerr. He proposed to build an alternative marine station facility on Cumbrae's adjacent island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde in the early years of the twentieth century to cater predominantly for marine researchers.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Chris Forster

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.


Author(s):  
Anthea Kraut

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Erica Torrens

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the state of Mexican genetics and biomedical knowledge during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as its impact on the visual representation of human groups and racial hierarchies, based on social studies of scientific imaging and visualization (SIV) and theoretical concepts and methods. It also addresses the genealogy and shifts of the concept of race and racialization of Mexican bodies, concluding with the novel visual culture that resulted from genetic knowledge merged with the racist phenomenon in the second half of the twentieth century in Mexico.


Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Galera

In the uneasy context of the Francoist regime, some authors tried to alleviate the difficult cultural situation through creation and translation. This is the case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener, commonly known as Tísner, a Catalan writer who was exiled to Mexico for more than twenty years. Translation from Spanish into Catalan played a major role in Tísner’s efforts to keep Catalan culture alive, and this article presents the major translation initiatives in this language combination throughout the twentieth century in order to provide enough context to give Artís-Gener’s endeavours their real weight. In Mexico, he wrote his most famous novel, Paraules d’Opoton el Vell (‘Words of Opoton the elder’), which describes the imagined ‘discovery’ of Europe by the Aztecs and creates a bond between the fate of the Nahuatl and the Catalan people under the yoke of Spanish imperialism. In 1992 Artís-Gener decided that the novel had to be retranslated into Spanish and undertook that task himself. In addition, Tísner translated major Latin American authors from Spanish into Catalan, an experience that gave him the chance to regain control of the language imposed by the Francoist regime and use it as a form of relief from the political oppression.


Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora

This chapter examines the development of the novel in Iraq. It first considers the beginnings of prose narrative in Iraq, using the intermingling of the short story and the novel, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, as a framework for reassessing the formal qualities of the Arabic novel. It then turns to romantic and historical novels published in the 1920s, as well as novels dealing with social issues like poverty and the condition of peasants in the countryside. It discusses the narrative emergence of the bourgeois intellectual’s self-awareness and interiority in Iraqi fiction, especially the novella; works that continued the expression of a critical social realism in the Iraqi novelistic tradition and the appearance of modernist aesthetics; and narratives that addressed dictatorship and war in Iraq. The chapter concludes with an overview of the novel genre in Iraq after 2003.


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