“Russia! What Do You Want of Me?”: The Russian Reading Public in DeadSouls

Slavic Review ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Lounsbery
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Periodical Literature ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Nikolai Gogol ◽  
Total Control ◽  
Dead Souls

This article analyzes the role of Russia's changing readership and incipient print culture in Dead Souls. Though Nikolai Gogol' was received in salon society, his primary allegiance was to print and the broad (and thus unsophisticated) readership that was beginning to buy and read printed texts. Like other of Gogol“s works (“On the Development of Periodical Literature in 1834 and 1835,” “The Portrait”), Dead Souls reflects the author's awareness of the severe limitations of this audience, especially their desire for conventional plot devices and their eagerness for characters with whom to identify. Although Dead Souls invites readers' participation, it also reflects Gogol“s growing skepticism about inexperienced readers' attempts to create meaning, his disdain for their judgment, and his desire to assert total control over the meaning of his art. Lounsbery considers Dead Souls' reception and situates Gogol“s work in the context of the appearance of Library for Reading in 1834 and other writers' approaches to the problem of Russia's reading public (notably Faddei Bulgarin and Osip Senkovskii).

THE DIASPORA AT HOME: INDIAN VIEWS AND THE MAKING OF ZULEIKHA MAYAT'S PUBLIC VOICE

Africa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thembisa Waetjen ◽  
Goolam Vahed
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Family Enterprises ◽  
The Family ◽  
Diasporic Community ◽  
Narrative Account

ABSTRACTThis article examines how the Gujarati-speaking Muslim trading class in South(ern) Africa was linked as a reading public through a newspaper, Indian Views, which had been founded in early twentieth-century Durban in opposition to Mahatma Gandhi's Indian Opinion. Under the editorship of Moosa Meer (1929–63) it was a conduit for sustaining existing social networks as well as offering common narratives that galvanized an idea of community embracing its geographically disparate readership. Between 1956 and 1963, Zuleikha Mayat, a self-described housewife born in Potchefstroom but married to a medical doctor in Durban whom she ‘met’ through the newspaper, wrote a weekly column that represented one of the first instances of a South African Muslim woman offering her ideas in print. She spoke across gender divides and articulated a moral social vision that accounted for both local and diasporic concerns. This article provides a narrative account of how Mayat came to write for Indian Views, a story that underscores the personal linkages within this diasporic community and, more broadly, how literacy and the family enterprises that constituted local print capitalism provided a material means of sustaining existing networks of village and family. It also reveals the role of newspaper as an interface between public and private spaces in helping to create a community of linguistically related readers who imagined themselves as part of a larger print culture.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT ‘TEA’ IN THE POEM ‘DEAD SOULS’ BY NIKOLAI GOGOL

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Ivan V. Burdin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Nikolai Gogol ◽  
The Road ◽  
Dead Souls ◽  
The Government ◽  
Tea Drinking

The article deals with the concept of ‘tea’ in the poem by Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls. The main representations of this concept in the poem are identified, its influence on the plot and the composition is determined, conclusions about the symbolic meaning of tea in Dead Souls are provided. Representations of the concept of ‘tea’ in the text of the poem are compared with the representations of the studied concept in other works by Gogol such as The Government Inspector, Nevsky Prospekt, The Portrait, The Nose, The Overcoat and others, which made it possible to draw a conclusion about the special role of tea in Dead Souls. The actualization of the studied concept in the text is compared with the literary and historical context, it is shown what Gogol’s innovativeness lies in, the features of the Gogol literary tea drinking are identified. In Dead Souls, the author pays special attention to treats, with the role of tea still being more significant than the role of other treats. Tea emphasizes the contrasts in the text, allows the author to make the grotesque brighter, illustrates the motive of the road, and serves as a vivid household detail. Key representations of the concept of ‘tea’ in the poem are: ‘an element of hospitality’, ‘an attribute of friendship’, ‘tea as a commodity’, ‘tea as an element of luxury’, ‘tea as part of alcohol culture’. Tea is inextricably connected with the key symbolic leitmotive of the work – the motive of the road. The representation of ‘tea as an attribute of travel’ brings the Gogol’s poem closer to other texts of Russian literature where tea is part of the semantic field ‘road’, and the path itself is endowed with a symbolic meaning.

The Rules of Prose in Sixteenth-Century China: Tang Shunzhi (1507-1560) as an Anthologist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-182
Author(s):  
Timothy Robert Clifford
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Endless Variety

AbstractThis paper examines the role of the anthologist in late imperial Chinese print culture. Specifically, it focuses on the sixteenth-century anthologist Tang Shunzhi. Tang’s first place finish in the 1529 metropolitan examinations came at a pivotal moment. As commercial anthology printers responded to an expanding reading public by applying readers’ aids such as punctuation and commentary to increasingly diverse textual corpora, Tang’s distinctive method of annotation was used to ‘reveal’ the rules of Ming examination prose operating universally across a seemingly endless variety of texts. At the same time, Tang’s own belief in universal rules of prose was the product of an educational movement to supplement the narrow and monotonous examination curriculum by providing students with anthologies of ancient literature. These two Tangs—one revealing uniformity within diversity, the other revealing diversity within uniformity—highlight contradictory trends toward both stereotypy and diversification within sixteenth-century print culture more broadly.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

The old garden

2021 ◽  
pp. 262-273
Author(s):  
A. E. Smirnov
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
Master Craftsman ◽  
Dead Souls ◽  
Fallen Leaves ◽  
The Village

Smirnov’s essay is devoted to an episode from Gogol’s Dead Souls [Myortvye dushi]; rather a landscape than an episode. In Gogol’s opinion, a landscape is not a copy of nature but an artist’s creation. A landscape is meant to be created, not copied from nature: the role of a master craftsman is not to usher the viewer along the trimmed bosquets of a French formal garden, unsurprising and immediately recognisable, but to lure them into the thicket of his imagination. It is with such a fruit of imagination that we are faced in the case of the neglected, unruly and overgrown garden on the landowner Plyushkin’s estate. The author examines Gogol’s description of the garden in detail, almost word by word, uncovering the hidden symbolic meaning of contrasting the village, ugly in its state of neglect, with the landowner’s garden, equally neglected but beautiful nonetheless. What is piles of rubbish in the village streets becomes pretty fallen leaves on the garden paths; the author suggests that Gogol used this contrast to let nature ‘correct’ the gardener, i. e. to remove the incompetent human alterations and reveal itself in its full glory.

The Search for Religious Authenticity and the Case of Passover Peanut Oil

2020 ◽  
pp. 212-234
Author(s):  
Zev Eleff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Peanut Oil ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Periodical Literature ◽  
Chicken Fat ◽  
American Judaism

This chapter uses the rise and fall of a popular Passover cooking ingredient to explore the role of competing European folkways to determine the religious course of American Orthodox Judaism. In the first half of the twentieth century, traditional-leaning Jews happily used peanut oil in place of chicken fat, relying on the Lithuanian position that peanuts were not considered a “legume,” a category of foods that Ashkenazic Jewry traditionally withheld from during the Passover holiday, in addition to leaven breads. However, late-arriving Hungarian and Israeli folkways fought and triumphed over the Lithuanian foodway by the final decades of the 1900s. This is emblematic of a broader religious confrontation with American Judaism. The use of a variety of sources––responsa, economic, archival, and periodical literature––underscores the importance of “lived religion” and the usefulness of folkways and foodways to gain a fuller appreciation of religious history.

Martineau, the Press and Jacksonian America

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-94
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Regional Variations ◽  
The Press ◽  
The City ◽  
North And South

Chapter Two considers Martineau’s American visit, the ways in which the three books she wrote out of it depict the role of education and a free press in the formation of American democracy, and the critical reception they received on both sides of the Atlantic. By contrast with the dichotomous readings of a nation divided between North and South along the lines of slave-ownership that have been the norm in studies of her visit, this chapter argues that the American books offer a more nuanced analysis of a society whose regional variations are most fully understood in terms of the extent to which they either have developed or constrained the development of a free press and a print culture that facilitates the evolution and implementation of liberal ideals. It pays particular attention to Martineau’s representation of the western states and, above all, Cincinnati, which she portrays as an exemplar of economic and moral stadial progress and as a counter to Boston, for her the ‘city of cant’ and an unexpected bastion of resistance to liberal change. Finally, the chapter shows how Martineau returned home committed to finding ways in which her work could participate in and contribute to America’s continuing advance and, in particular, focused upon prospective roles for herself in supporting the interwoven causes of abolitionism and of women’s ability to become agents of social progress.

Errant Readers

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-112
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
The Public ◽  
Journal Editors ◽  
Uncertain Outcome ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
Leisure Reading ◽  
Reform Project

This chapter discusses serialized translated novels. The Arabic novel made its own proper entry into the Arabic print sphere at this moment as a part of the uncertain reform project of print culture. Novels were published after and alongside a larger body of serialized translated novels that in fact occupied the greater part of the new audience's leisure reading habits. Over the course of the first decades of commercial print from the late 1850s to the late 1870s, serialized translated novels appeared in almost every type of Arabic periodical; for many readers, the word “novel” itself probably referred to these works and not the few original ones produced to compete with them. It was not just news translation that was central to the development of Arabic print culture; the translated novel, which appeared first and most prominently in serialized form, was often identified as part of periodicals' reform projects. At the same time that editors embraced translated fiction as a vehicle for their messages, however, their claim that these works served serious moral purposes was by no means indisputable. These novels' excesses were not always containable by the moral intentions of journal editors, who sometimes resorted to qualifications and elaborate interpretations in order to justify their publication. Print's civilizing reform mission, as uncertain as it was, had a primary object: the modern reading subject. Transforming the public into a reading public, and one that read properly, was the goal of many magazine producers who outlined ideal reading practices and modeled them through novels. And it was likewise a goal with an uncertain outcome.

scholarly journals THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE IN MYCENAEAN GREECE

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA W. SHELMERDINE
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Time Interaction ◽  
Binary Model ◽  
State Economy ◽  
Total Control ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Linear B

Abstract Understanding of Mycenaean palatial administration has moved from a monolithic view of the palace as having total control over the economy of a given state, to a binary model that imagines a non-palatial sector of the state economy alongside the palatial. Further research suggests, however, that we should rather think of a continuum, with individuals and groups involved in various ways and to various degrees with the central palatial administration, from full-time interaction to no contact at all. The evidence shows the negotiating power of individuals, and also the role of the palace as a consumer rather than simply as a producer. This paper brings together some indications of such a continuum, drawn chiefly from the Linear B tablets. It closes with a brief look at relevant archaeological evidence: the use of seals to indicate status and authority, and the evidence of non-palatial settlements within palatial states.

Facing an “Emotional Crunch”: State Visits as Political Performances During the Cold War

2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Derix
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Emotional Burden ◽  
Total Control ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
And Behavior

This article argues that state visits are highly symbolic political performances by analyzing state visits to Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s. The article concentrates on how state visits blended in the Cold War's culture of suspicion and political avowal. Special emphasis is placed on the role of mass media and on the guests' reactions and behavior. State visits to Berlin illuminate the heavy performative and emotional burden placed on all participants. Being aware of the possibilities for self-presentation offered by state visits, West German officials incorporated state visitors into their symbolic battle for reunification. A visit to Berlin with extensive media coverage was, therefore, of prime importance for the German hosts. Despite their sophisticated visualization strategies, total control of events was impossible. Some visitors did not want to play their allotted role and avoided certain sites in Berlin, refused to be accompanied by journalists or cancelled their trips altogether.

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