The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.

Author(s):  
Gavin Miller

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>


Popular Music ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Preston

Music is part of everyday life in late twentieth-century America, due primarily to the technology of recorded sound. We are surrounded by it: we have radios to wake us in the morning and to entertain us while we drive our automobiles, background music on television and in movies, ‘atmosphere’ music in elevators and restaurants, and collections of musical recordings in our homes. Because most of the music heard today is recorded, we assume that the pervasiveness of music in our lives is, indeed, a twentieth-century phenomenon. There is evidence to suggest, however, that music was almost as commonplace for late nineteenth-century urban Americans as it is for us today. The popularity of sheet music and of ubiquitous parlour pianos are obvious manifestations of amateur music making by the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Less well known, however, is the fact that Americans of the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially urban Americans, were in frequent contact with professional performing musicians, who played not only at functions where we would expect to find music but also, as a matter of course, at events with which we do not normally associate music and musicians.


2014 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Michael Strickland

This article deals with the trials of two evangelical scholars, one from the late nineteenth century, Alexander B. Bruce, and the other from the late twentieth, Robert Gundry. Both faced accusation and judgment from their peers because of their redaction-critical remarks about the synoptic gospels. Bruce was tried by the Free Church of Scotland, while Gundry’s membership in the Evangelical Theological Society was challenged. After considering the cases of both, consideration is given to potential lessons that evangelical scholars who use redactioncritical methods may learn from the experiences of both men.


Author(s):  
Ronald Labonté ◽  
Arne Ruckert

International health, a concern with the high burden of preventable disease in poorer countries, is long-standing. In late nineteenth century sanitary reforms and early twentieth century philanthropic financing to control infectious diseases in the Americas, this concern also foreshadows more contemporary debates over global health financing and the ‘health securitization’ of wealthier nations against diseases spreading from poorer ones. By the late twentieth century, however, there was a shift in discourse from ‘international’ to ‘global’ health underpinned by the growing awareness that there are inherently global reasons for why some countries are wealthier and healthier, while others remain poorer and sicker. Two different frameworks are used to unpack these causal pathways, in which globalization processes are regarded as meta-determinants of health inequities within and between nations. Although researchers argue that globalization processes have been good for health, others are much less sanguine on this claim.


PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.


2018 ◽  
pp. 94-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kama Maclean

This chapter discusses the racist environment in late nineteenth-century Australia which resulted in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 designed to prohibit entry of non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth. The chapter discusses the evolution of various collective terms like ‘alien’, ‘coolie’ or ‘Hindoo’ to identify Indians as the ‘other’ of the national community. From biographical details and photographs in the Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs), which monitored the movement and identities of non-white residents, the chapter reveals how many Indians had undergone a change of name during immigration, an important marker of individual identity. The chapter argues that the most commonly ascribed name ‘Charlie’, was a means of ‘infantilizing and subordinating’ Indian migrants. The CEDT images of migrants in Indian clothes and identified with their new names are seen as locating Indian settlers in early twentieth-century Australia in a position of subordination within the colonial social hierarchy.


Author(s):  
R. Blake Brown

AbstractThis article explains why and how some Canadians have asserted a right to possess firearms from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It demonstrates that several late-nineteenth-century politicians asserted a right to arms for self-defence purposes based on the English Bill of Rights. This “right” was forgotten until opponents of gun control dusted it off in the late twentieth century. Firearm owners began to assert such a right based upon the English Bill of Rights, William Blackstone, and the English common law. Their claims remained judicially untested until recent cases finally undermined such arguments.


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