Maya’s Materialistic Longings Resulting in Alienation and Frustration: A Feminist Reading of Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock

Anita Mazumdar Desai occupies a much privileged place in the Indian Writing in English. She is known as an acclaimed Indian woman novelist who deals with the psychological problems of her women characters. She was born in 24 June 1937 in Mussoorie. Her father D.N. Majumdar was a Bengali businessman and her mother Toni Nime was a German immigrant. Anita Desai is working as Emeritus John E. Buchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anita Desai got a congenial environment to learn different languages in her own home and neighbourhood. She learnt Hindi from her neighbourhood. They used to speak German, Bengali, Urdu and English at their home. She learnt English at her school. She attended Queens Mary Higher Senior Secondary School in Delhi and she did her B.A. in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. So far is Anita Desai literary career is concerned, she wrote her first novel Cry, the Peacock in 1963. With the help of P. Lal, they founded the publishing firm Writers Workshop. Clear Light of Day (1980) is her most autobiographical work. Her novel In Custody was enlisted for the Booker Prize. She became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. When she published her novel Fasting Feasting and it won the Booker Prize in 1999, she came to the limelight. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times in 1980, 1984 and 1999 for her novels Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting Feasting (1999) respectively. She received Padma Bhushan in 2014 also. She has received Sahitya Akademi Award in 1937 for her well-known novel Fire on the Mountain. The present paper analyses the central female protagonist Maya’s materialistic pursuits which turn in a great catastrophe for her in the novel Cry, the Peacock.

Digital Piracy, Creative Productivity, and Customer Care Effort: Evidence from the Digital Publishing Industry

This study empirically examines the effect of copyright piracy reduction on writers’ creative productivity and customer care efforts using data from a digital publishing firm.

Relationships among Commercial Biases and Author Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Publishing

Recently, concerns have been raised over the potential impacts of commercial biases on editorial practices in biomedical publishing. Specifically, it has been suggested that commercial biases may make editors more open to publishing articles with author conflicts of interest (aCOI). Using a data set of 128,781 articles published in 159 journals, we evaluated the relationships among commercial publishing biases and reported author conflicts of interest. The 159 journals were grouped according to commercial biases (reprint services, advertising revenue, and ownership by a large commercial publishing firm). 30.6% (39,440) of articles were published in journals showing no evidence of commercial publishing biases. 33.9% (43,630) were published in journals accepting advertising and reprint fees; 31.7% (40,887) in journals owned by large publishing firms; 1.2% (1,589) in journals accepting reprint fees only; and 2.5 % (3,235) in journals accepting only advertising fees. Journals with commercial biases were more likely to publish articles with aCOI (9.2% (92/1000) vs. 6.4% (64/1000), p = 0.024). In the multivariate analysis, only a journal’s acceptance of reprint fees served as a significant predictor (OR = 2.81 at 95% CI, 1.5 to 8.6). Shared control estimation was used to evaluate the relationships between commercial publishing biases and aCOI frequency in total and by type. BCa-corrected mean difference effect sizes ranged from -1.0 to 6.1, and confirm findings indicating that accepting reprint fees may constitute the most significant commercial bias. The findings indicate that concerns over the influence of industry advertising in medical journals may be overstated, and that accepting fees for reprints may constitute the largest risk of bias for editorial decision-making.

La cultura catalana a Itàlia: el cas de Cesare Giardini.

This paper looks at aspects of the life and work of the Italian Catalanophile Cesare Giardini (Bologna 1893–Milan 1970) up until the 1930s. Giardini’s initial activity as an actor afforded him the chance to travel to Barcelona in 1912 with the theatre company of the great Italian actress Lyda Borelli. During the month that Giardini spent in Barcelona, he was able to get in touch with a number of representatives of Catalan culture despite his considerable youth. In the 1920s, he began working with the Milan publishing firm Edizioni Alpi, which published Italian translations of Catalan works, such as The Catalan Nationality by Enric Prat de la Riba (1924). Giardini’s efforts to disseminate Catalan literature also involved his publication of a large number of articles in various newspapers and magazines throughout his long career. In 1926, he put out an anthology of Catalan poets through the publishing firm of Piero Gobetti (Edizioni del Baretti) and this anthology would be reprinted in 1950 with few changes.

International Agricultural and Extension Education: Meeting the Unknown Challenges of Tomorrow

The purpose of this paper is to provide philosophical observations and reflections over 25 years of the Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education (JIAEE) as a reader, author, and editor. The paper provides a brief history of JIAEE including changes that occurred over the years. This paper honors those that contributed to JIAEE and stood as its caretakers over the past 25 years. This main body of the paper is divided into three sections: early years, middle years, and contemporary years. The paper explores the development and use of JIAEE keywords and provides visual depictions using wordclouds. The purpose of keywords is discussed and suggestions for future use are provided. Final recommendations and well wishes for the future are provided. Recommendations include: Considering the hiring of a permanent editor or publishing firm such as Taylor & Francis; creating a purposeful research agenda in conjunction with AIAEE; and redressing the developing and use of keywords

The Contemporary Anglophone Romance Genre

The romance genre is geared financially to a female readership worldwide: a genre written and consumed overwhelmingly by women, and with a male readership of around 14 percent. Since the 21st century, romance novels have generated over $1.3 billion dollars in sales per annum in the United States, where one out of four books sold and one out of two mass-market books sold are romance novels. According to romance publishing behemoth Harlequin Mills & Boon, the company publishes 120 new titles each month, drawing from a stable of 200 authors within the UK and a further 1,300 worldwide. A Mills & Boon volume is sold every four seconds in more than one hundred countries, translated into twenty-six languages. But the romance genre consists of more than Harlequin Mills & Boon novels. According to industry definitions in the United States and Australia, a romance novel consists of “a central love story” and “an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending” (Romance Writers of America website). As long as these two basic requirements are met, romance novels can have any tone or style (barring a mocking or derisive one) and be set in any time (past, present, or future) or place (in the real world or in a fantasyland). They may include varying degrees of sensuality, from the modest discretion of Christian “inspirationals” to highly explicit descriptions of sexual acts in romantic erotica. They may also overlap with any other genre, such as chick lit, historical, crime, suspense, or thriller. The roots of the romance novel can be traced back to Shakespearean comedies, with the celebratory betrothal of the romantic couple forming the happy ending of such plays as Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or As You Like It. In prose fiction, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) are considered literary forebearers. The modern romance was shaped by British publishing firm Mills & Boon, which became a market leader in the genre by the 1930s with a distribution network in all British Commonwealth countries and colonies in the first half of the 20th century. During the 1950s, Mills & Boon novels began to be distributed in North America by Canadian firm Harlequin, and the two companies merged in 1971 to form the romance publishing powerhouse Harlequin Mills & Boon, which had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s when it became the world’s largest publisher of romances, having 80 percent of the world’s market share of fiction. Over time, the genre changed its representations of gender and attitudes toward women’s work and domestic life. The 1970s and 1980s saw a gradual Americanization of the genre as New York firms muscled in on Harlequin Mills & Boon’s territory, publishing historical romances and diversifying contemporary romances to include American romantic protagonists, settings, and themes. The genre also became increasingly sexualized during this period through its depiction of sexual activity. The turn of the 21st century witnessed an increasing fragmentation of the genre as the rise of independent publishers afforded writers and readers the opportunity to explore niche markets: erotica, African American stories, paranormal romances featuring vampires, phoenixes, and werewolves, among other shapeshifting romantic protagonists, and many others.

Die edition suhrkamp

The article focuses on two important paratextual features of edition suhrkamp – its cover design and its seriality. In examining the complex relationship of these features both with respect to each other and to the image and content of edition suhrkamp, it can be shown that the paratext produces a surplus of meaning and thus allows the series to represent both the publishing firm of Suhrkamp and the “Suhrkamp Culture”.

The Female Authors of Cadell and Davies

This chapter explores the publishing firm of Cadell and Davies and its relationships with its female authors. During the seven decades in which it operated, in various incarnations between 1765 and 1836, the firm published many influential female authors of the period, including Fanny Burney, Hannah Cowley, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Helen Maria Williams. Through a careful examination of the surviving correspondence and the bibliographical history of their publications of women's writing, this chapter engages in a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the firm’s business practices and women’s engagement with the commercial world of print. The print networks described in the chapter emphasize the centralized position, and asymmetrical power, that male publishers held within a marketplace abundant with female writers seeking to print their works.

Tauchnitz Has a Rival

This chapter focuses on Albatross Press's emergence as a rival of German publishing firm Bernhard Tauchnitz. By the time Nazi officials started scrutinizing Albatross and its books, books in English had been part of the German economy for almost a century. It was Bernhard Tauchnitz that had seized on the idea of selling inexpensive English-language paperbacks throughout continental Europe. By 1931, Tauchnitz editions had grown into a thriving sector of the international book trade. When Dr. Hans Otto, the head of the Tauchnitz board, first heard rumors of the Albatross Press in late October 1931, he paid attention. This chapter examines how Bernhard Tauchnitz under Otto handled the challenges presented by Albatross, who was led by the trio of Max Christian Wegner, John Holroyd-Reece, and Kurt Enoch.