The construction of a bestseller: theoretical and empirical approaches to the case of the Fifty Shades trilogy as an eBook bestseller

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 1100-1117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terje Colbjørnsen
Keyword(s):  
Digital Publishing ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Bestseller List ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Substantial Impact ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Information Regime ◽  
Empirical Approaches

In both eBook and print versions, EL James’ Fifty Shades trilogy has made a substantial impact on bestseller lists across the world. But what does it mean to be a bestseller? Is the eBook bestseller different from its print counterpart? Taking the case of the Fifty Shades trilogy as a starting point, this article looks into the overall topic of bestsellers and digital publishing with specific attention paid to the Norwegian book market and the publishing history of the trilogy in Norway. The article examines these issues in line with an understanding of the bestseller as the product of a cultural logic rather than a reflection of popular taste. The article argues that since a bestseller is identified through its position on a bestseller list, the status is dependent on a general cultural recognition and the inclusion in a particular market information regime. The case of Fifty Shades highlights new trends in publishing and new elements to the construction of the bestseller, but also how the construction of the bestseller was dependent on its integration into the traditional channels of publishing.

scholarly journals Genrens tøven

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Book Market ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Semantics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Or History

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.

Augustinus: Der Markt der Geschwätzigkeit und der Sinn des Verstehens

Rhetorik ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann Kreuzer
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
De Trinitate ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
De Magistro ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThe paper discusses the intellectual development of Augustinus by means of his discussion of the status, the sense, the function and his judgement on rhetoric. This discussion let Augustinus be an important station in the history of the philosophy of language. Starting point is the explanation of the dialectics of the topos (or pathos) of the ›ineffabilis‹. Augustinus shows that the antirhetoric meaning of the ineffable leads in selfcontradictions. Therefore he discusses the forms and the conditions of understanding. This begins with the early dialogue De magistro and reaches to De trinitate and one of the central subjects within this theoretical mainwork of Augustinus: the concept of the verbum intimum. With the (at first view) extreme reductionism in the theory of signs, presented in De magistro - a mental ›oracle‹ is claimed as instance and criterion of understanding -, he destructs the naive representation-belief in an 1:1-relation between outer signs and mental contents. The subject of the ›inner word‹ in De trinitate then is the question of understanding signs as signs. It is shown that only the explanation of the inner word as a mental achievement within ordinary language is sufficient to answer the question of understanding. An excursus elucidates that the sermocinalis scientia of Wilhelm v. Ockham in the 14th century continues the discoveries and philosophical innovations, Augustinus made at the end of antiquity. These discoveries are inalienable for present debates concerning the philosophy of language. And they are inalienable for concepts of rhetoric based in the hermeneutics of understanding. The critique of rhetoric as ›fair of talkativeness‹ brings up a purified sight of the art of language: of the art, language ›is‹.

scholarly journals Protist taxonomy: an ecological perspective

2004 ◽  
Vol 359 (1444) ◽  
pp. 599-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bland J. Finlay
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Similarity ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Ecological Niches ◽  
Freshwater Pond ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Near Future

This is an exploration of contemporary protist taxonomy within an ecological perspective. As it currently stands, the ‘morphospecies’ does not accommodate the information that might support a truly ecological species concept for the protists. But the ‘morphospecies’ is merely a first step in erecting a taxonomy of the protists, and it is expected to become more meaningful in the light of genetic, physiological and ecological research in the near future. One possible way forward lies in the recognition that sexual and asexual protists may all be subject to forces of cohesion that result in (DNA) sequence–similarity clusters. A starting point would then be the detection of ‘ecotypes’—where genotypic and phenotypic clusters correspond; but for that we need better information regarding the extent of clonality in protists, and better characterization of ecological niches and their boundaries. There is some progress with respect to the latter. Using the example of a community of ciliated protozoa living in the stratified water column of a freshwater pond, it is shown to be possible to gauge the potential of protists to partition their local environment into ecological niches. Around 40 morphospecies can coexist in the superimposed water layers, which presumably represent different ecological niches, but we have yet to discover if these are discrete or continuously variable. It is a myth that taxonomic problems are more severe for protists than for animals and plants. Most of the fundamental problems associated with species concepts (e.g. asexuals, sibling species, phenotypic variation) are distributed across biota in general. The recent history of the status of Pfiesteria provides a model example of an integrated approach to solving what are essentially taxonomic problems.

Freedom and Religious Worldview

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-159
Author(s):  
Mikhail Yu. Sergeev ◽  
Aleksandr E. Rybas
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Worldview ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

The article, written in the form of a dialogue/discussion, examines the problem of freedom in the context of its interpretation in religious and philosophical thought. The starting point for considering freedom is the thesis that the concept of freedom, as it is presented in the metaphysical and spiritual traditions, hinders both the philosophical understanding of freedom and its implementation in practice since the status of the concept requires the identification of freedom with the knowledge of freedom. However, the knowledge, as it always implies being universal, excludes the possibility of a different understanding of freedom, which leads to the confusion of freedom and necessity. While criticizing this thesis, Mikhail Sergeev insists that the adoption of a particular system of beliefs, including religious faith, does not necessarily make other people understand freedom the same way, which leads to the elimination of freedom in real life and to the substitution of freedom by necessity on theoretical level: as the history of philosophy and religion shows, there have always been many different concepts of freedom, even within the same school or tradition. From the point of view of Aleksandr Rybas, the variety of interpretations of freedom is such only formally since each of these interpretations is aimed at formulating the only one, “true” concept of freedom, resulting from the chosen point of view and therefore making it necessary to characterize alternative views as false: the very idea of “true” freedom is rooted in the specifics of metaphysical thinking, which should be seen the reason for the rejection of freedom. As a result of the discussion, however, some common views on freedom were developed. In particular, freedom was defined as the inherent ability of man to consciously initiate his own changes and determine the parameters of his own existence. Moreover, it was argued that there could not be the only valid or universal form of human life.

Polnische Bibliothek

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-74
Author(s):  
Paweł Zajas
Keyword(s):  
Publishing House ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
The Other ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Culture ◽  
The One

AbstractThe Polnische Bibliothek, founded by the German Institute for Polish Culture in Darmstadt, financed by Robert Bosch Foundation and published by the Suhrkamp Publishing House, remains a unique attempt at presenting Polish literature in the German book market. This paper focuses on the historical, political and cultural background of the series and the conflicts at the backstage of its initiation. The analysis, based mostly on the so far unpublished archival correspondence of the publishing house has two aims: on the one hand, a historiographic description of the so far unknown processes of Polish literature transfer lies at its centre, on the other, it addresses the need for appropriate conceptualisations of such phenomena. The study is framed in the category of Histoire croisée in this case applied to an analysis of translation production. Activities of all the actors involved, the conflicts and solutions to them constitute the starting point. These generate an argumentation space which offers insights into the history of production of the series that had since its beginning been marked by conflicting expectations.

The Larkin's Technologies of Trust

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-318
Author(s):  
Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Soap Manufacturer ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Processing Techniques ◽  
Information Regime ◽  
Office Equipment

In The Larkin's Technologies of Trust, Zeynep Çelik Alexander uses the card ledger invented by Darwin D. Martin, corporate secretary for the Larkin Company, as a starting point for a new history of a well-known modernist building: the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Founded in 1875 as a soap manufacturer, the Larkin Company had grown dramatically by the beginning of the twentieth century, in large part because of innovative marketing strategies made possible by ingenious information-processing techniques. But it was also thanks to Wright's designs for office equipment—informed by principles of modularity and interchangeability—that armies of “human computers” were able to maintain this information regime. Çelik Alexander argues that the bureaucracy made possible by the Larkin Administration Building's architecture has been a blind spot in historiography; she aims to offer an architecturally oriented account of the history of data as epistemic unit, contending that the Larkin's protodatabase was, first and foremost, a moral technology predicated on managing networks of trust.

scholarly journals ХРИШЋАНСКО ВАСПИТАЊЕ И МОДЕРНА ПЕДАГОШКА МИСАО

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Ивица Живковић
Keyword(s):  
Christian Education ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Pedagogical Approach ◽  
Maria Montessori ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Historical Periods

Christian pedagogy is based in a specific pedagogical approach which, through all the historical periods, represents more than same possible new doctrine, new pedagogical theory or system of pedagogical comprehensions in the world. In this article we review Christian education by several most general principles, among which the most important are: the starting point of the faith in God, the specific relationship of love for child and the awareness of human sin. Furthermore we explore the opinion of some relevant researchers who claimed that the significance attributed to child in the history of pedagogical thought is related to the more profound penetration of Christian religion into the customs and perceptions of the Western world. The influence of Christianity is also apparent in the emancipatory tendencies of pedagogical classics, first of all in the attitudes of Maria Montessori, whose interpretation of Christ’s words on children may be quoted as one of the greatest challenges for the contemporary understanding about the child issue. The status of child and grown-ups in the modern world imposes certain perplexities, and Christian pedagogy can propose some material contribution to their resolution.

The status of Gideon Mantell's “first” Iguanodon tooth in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. YALDWYN ◽  
GARRY J. TEE ◽  
ALAN P. MASON
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gideon Mantell

A worn Iguanodon tooth from Cuckfield, Sussex, illustrated by Mantell in 1827, 1839, 1848 and 1851, was labelled by Mantell as the first tooth sent to Baron Cuvier in 1823 and acknowledged as such by Sir Charles Lyell. The labelled tooth was taken to New Zealand by Gideon's son Walter in 1859. It was deposited in a forerunner of the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington in 1865 and is still in the Museum, mounted on a card bearing annotations by both Gideon Mantell and Lyell. The history of the Gideon and Walter Mantell collection in the Museum of New Zealand is outlined, and the Iguanodon tooth and its labels are described and illustrated. This is the very tooth which Baron Cuvier first identified as a rhinoceros incisor on the evening of 28 June 1823.

The European Charter of Local Self-Government

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Himsworth
Keyword(s):  
Critical Study ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Additional Protocol ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional Authorities

The first critical study of the 1985 international treaty that guarantees the status of local self-government (local autonomy). Chris Himsworth analyses the text of the 1985 European Charter of Local Self-Government and its Additional Protocol; traces the Charter’s historical emergence; and explains how it has been applied and interpreted, especially in a process of monitoring/treaty enforcement by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities but also in domestic courts, throughout Europe. Locating the Charter’s own history within the broader recent history of the Council of Europe and the European Union, the book closes with an assessment of the Charter’s future prospects.

A Universe of Societies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Debaise
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Relations ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.

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