scholarly journals “A Nondescript Monster”: Fanny Fern in Transatlantic Print Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-187
Author(s):  
Mashael Alhammad
Keyword(s):  
Private Life ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Stable Form ◽  
Fanny Fern ◽  
The Public ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Ruth Hall

Fanny Fern (real name Sara Payson Willis Parton) was one of the most profitable American columnists and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Fern sustained her celebrity status largely through unauthorised reprints of her articles in American and British papers. Consequently, her public image was for the most part constructed through those reprinted articles, which were usually framed by speculations about her private life. This article examines the implications and limitations of Fern’s efforts to stabilise the dissemination of her public image in periodicals by using the relatively more stable form of the book. As a celebrity, she had limited control over the way she was publicly represented. As a woman in the public sphere, she was particularly vulnerable to slander and libel. The circulation of a spurious biography entitled The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855), alongside her sanctioned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, profited from her literary brand while simultaneously undermining it. Examining how these competing narratives about Fern’s private life – one fictionalised, one unauthorised – shaped her literary reputation at home and in England, this paper argues that textual representations as well as material market choices, including book bindings and advertising techniques, shaped authorship in the increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary market of the mid-century in ways that both benefited and imperilled the female writer.

Space in common: Socially engaged art in the Athens of crisis

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charis Kanellopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Impact

During the last years ‐ within a constantly deepening social, political and economic crisis ‐ Athens’s public space appears challenging, presenting a character of ongoing re-evaluation and change. It is due to the impact of the crisis, for example, that the city’s public space is being approached once more by many citizens who, during the years before the recession, had chosen to transfer main activities and functions of public life to the more protected sphere of privateness. One notices the return to open spaces by locals not only for leisure but also for social interaction. Most emphatically, however, appears the fact of a rising number of population in need, such as homeless people, immigrants or refugees, who host aspects of their private life in the public sphere: most of the times, they are not only users, but rather habitants of public space, in a transitional situation of social suspension, lacking a sense of belonging. Under the light of the city’s different realities, and of an expected social co-existence, the article aims to present the practice of artists who become active in Athens’s public spaces of social ambivalence in Athens, by realizing socially engaged art projects. By focusing on case studies such as Nomadic Architecture Network’s projects, the Victoria Square Project by Rick Lowe and Maria Papadimitriou, Common Platforms, a Blind Date by Adonis Volanakis, along with Rafika Chawishe, or the UrbanDig_Omonia by the UrbanDig Project in Omonia square, among others, the article highlights the artists’ interest in understanding the historical and cultural dynamics of each area and in working with different participants of the community in an effort to find common ground and to create bonds among individuals of unalike backgrounds. The article shows how such artistic practices become a channel of creative expression and fruitful dialogue in environments of precariousness and intolerance. Showing the importance of cooperation and understanding, socially engaged art projects function positively as collaborative ‘heterotopias’ in turbulent times for Athens.

The Portable Home: The Domestication of Public Space

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 324-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar ◽  
Ekaterina Makarova
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Privileged Site

Much commentary indicates that, starting from the 19th century, the home has become the privileged site of private life. In doing so it has established an increasingly rigid separation between the private and public spheres. This article does not disagree with this basic conviction. But we argue that, in more recent times, there has been a further development, in that the private life of the home has been carried into the public sphere—what we call “the domestication of public space.” This has led to a further attenuation of public life, especially as regards sociability. It has also increased the perception that what is required is a better “balance” between public and private. We argue that this misconstrues the nature of the relation of public to private in those periods that attained the greatest degree of sociability, and that not “balance” but “reciprocity” is the desired condition.

Löwentattoos auf Streife?

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-64
Author(s):  
Klaus Schönenbroicher
Keyword(s):  
Public Service ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Public ◽  
Basic Law

Abstract Recently, there have been various conflicts with regard to extravagant or flashy body styling of applicants for police career, like conspicuous tattoos and piercings. The essay discusses the general requirements, which bear uponapplicants in the interest of public image cultivation, separation ofpowers in the light of basic rules. As Article 33 (5) of the Basic Law obligates the state to organize the public service according to traditional principles of German civil service, constitutional law offers a basis to justify interferences in private life, as far as the duties inherent in the servise as police officers require neutrality.

scholarly journals Private/Public Space of New Media

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alla Drozdova ◽  
◽  
Natalia Stepanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Multiple Network ◽  
The Individual

Today, we have a situation that the new media environment has reshaped our conception of reality while changing social spaces, modes of existence, and the functional mechanisms of the private sphere. In the space of new media, the boundary between privacy and publicity is redefined with the emergence of multiple network communities having become a subject of observation and evaluation, collective discussions, and even third party interventions. In the current situation, the privacy/publicity boundary can be defined both through the societal/the individual, and through such concepts as visible/invisible. The new media era sees the personification of online publicness, therefore the very sphere of private life gets consumed by the public sphere open both for being discussed and for being controlled by the government, market, and advertisement. The public sphere has fallen under the power of certain private/vested interests, which only transiently become common, coinciding with the interests of other groups, but not the public sphere. The ambivalent nature of new media, while based on personalisation and filtration, obviously determines the ambiguous and controversial relationship of the public and the private. Thus, the private not only reflects, but also represents the public, whereas the public implements privacy up to its inherent special intimate atmosphere and intonation. This fast-changing virtual reality requires the development of conceptual tools for analysing new content and forms of social and personal life, one of which is the relationship between publicity and privacy.

scholarly journals Women Judges, Private Lives: (In)visibilities in Fact and Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Thornton ◽  
Heather Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Women Judges ◽  
The Public ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Public Sphere

Throughout the Western intellectual tradition, the separation of public and private life has been ubiquitous.[footnote* See, eg, Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds), Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Margaret Thornton (ed), Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates (Oxford University Press, 1995); Ruth Gavison, ‘Feminism and the Public/Private Distinction’ (1992) 45 Stanford Law Review 1; S I Benn and G F Gaus (eds), Public and Private in Social Life (Croom Helm, 1983); Frances E Olsen, ‘The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform’ (1983) 96 Harvard Law Review 1497.] Although the line of demarcation changes according to time and circumstance, the conjunction of the public sphere with the masculine and the private sphere with the feminine has remained a constant in political thought.

Effusive Elegies or Catty Critic: Letitia Elizabeth Landon On Felicia Hemans

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
The Public ◽  
Letitia Elizabeth Landon ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract Rather than dutifully producing conventional elegies bemoaning the loss of the exemplary woman poet immediately after Felicia Hemans’s death in 1835, Letitia Elizabeth Landon daringly objects to the disjunction between Hemans’s life and her public image. Landon dissents from regarding Hemans’s poetry as unblemished in its depiction of women’s traditional domestic role and instead hints at the subversive, indirect discontent she detects in Hemans’s verse — long before twentieth-century critics. Women writers must surely have enjoyed witnessing their gender’s growing success in the literary market, but, since women were competing against one another directly in the public sphere, it was inevitable that some regarded each other as competitors and experienced envy of others’ achievements. After her sister’s death, Harriet Hughes might record that Hemans “would rejoice in [the gifted writers of her own sex’s] success with true sisterly disinterestedness,” but Landon does not appear to have adopted such a “generous” stance (121).

The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism

1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Lowi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Part ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Public Sphere

Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

Secularism, Nationalism, and Minorities in Turkey

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Merdjanova
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Justice And Development Party ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Public Sphere

The vivid interest in the philosophical and legal premises of secularism in Turkey, as well as in its workings in the public and private life of Turkish citizens resonates with an ongoing questioning in Western academia of the validity of established theories of secularization. More importantly, the political and social transformations in Turkey itself, and the growing role and visibility of Islam in the public sphere, especially during the last decade marked by the rule of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party (jdp), have triggered a search for new explanatory frameworks and reconceptualization of Turkish secularism.The four books discussed in this article tackle the interrelated issues of secularism, nationalism and minorities in Turkey from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Privacy, Literature, and Public Discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-563
Author(s):  
David Rosen ◽  
Aaron Santesso
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Individual Privacy ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Sacrifice

Abstract In the last few decades, something has changed about how Americans conceive of privacy, which has had consequences for how writers address their publics: how writers write. This essay argues that rapidly evolving and expanding surveillance regimes have profoundly affected our sense of where the private life begins and ends and what can or cannot be concealed from others. Discourses characterized by fragmentation, opacity, and indirection have become both a means by which we communicate information about ourselves to the larger world and a mimetic representation of how that surveillance-mediated world often appears to us. Literature has played a crucial role in these transformations and has served as a laboratory for many of these emerging discourses. This essay focuses on two recent and contrasting cohorts of American writers: a slightly older group of authors who saw the sacrifice of individual privacy as having catastrophic implications for liberal democracy, and a younger group whose views of privacy and communication were, on the whole, less panicked and more tactical. The essay concludes by considering what happens when rhetorical modes meant primarily to preserve the private self reenter the public sphere and assert themselves within a civil-minded conversation.

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