Science journalism in Hindi in pre-independence India: A study of Hindi periodicals

Science journalism in Hindi originated in the late nineteenth century. Hindi literary periodicals provided the first platform for science to be discussed along with literature. The onset of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable advance in Hindi literary writing, and science writing also flourished with this advance. A remarkable overlap and a complementary relationship between the development of Hindi literature and Hindi commentaries on sciences is evident. Equally important in this context was the backdrop provided by a politically contentious process of evolution of a ‘modern’, ‘standard’ Hindi, and by the anti-colonial freedom movement, yoked to the idea of cultural and economic nationalism. The article surveys certain popular periodicals that regularly published essays and commentaries on science and scientific subjects. These periodicals were instrumental in shaping the popular discourses on science. The article also underlines an overwhelming effort by the intelligentsia to seek a philosophical commensurability between modern science and ‘traditional’ schools of thought. It concludes that the predominance of these characteristics in Hindi science journalism was a reflection of the agenda of the Hindi intelligentsia, shaped by linguistic nationalism framed alongside or in conjunction with a revivalist perspective.

An Impossible Task? Reconciling Europeanism and National Popular Culture in Caliban (1947–51)

A kind of hybrid between high-profile political and literary periodicals and successful popular book digests targeted at a mass audience, the French magazine Caliban (1947–51) both tried to adjust to a fast-changing global marketplace and to defend a form of cultural legitimacy based on national claims against globalist domination. This article traces the evolution of the magazine’s editorial venture in relation to questions connected to the issues of modernity and mobility. In particular, it aims at examining Caliban’s implacable ‘anti-digest’ stance.

Shaping the Canon. The International Profile of Viața Românească (1906-1916)

The present paper aims to investigate the circulation of foreign cultural input in one of the most important Romanian literary periodicals of the prewar era. The main focus of the present research revolves around the means by which the editorial group of Viața Românească (The Romanian Life), have managed to create an international dialogue oriented towards Western models that helped shape the modernization of both the autochthonous literary production and the critical or theoretical national systems. Generally considered a rather reactionary community, with nationalistic tendencies, the aforementioned literary group has engaged in many occasions into transplanting foreign theoretical and critical models. The amplitude of these communications and its quite remarkable effects on the Romanian cultural scene may still come as a surprise. By means of quantitative and digital methods, the present proposal attempts to measure and investigate this very particular process.

Introduction

The Introduction situates the fifteen chapters of the volume in the context of the sharp decline in Addison’s cultural and literary reputation since the beginning of the twentieth century, seeking to outline ways in which this collection might help reverse that decline, or at least challenge the ideological prejudices and critical misapprehensions that block a rounded appreciation of Addison and his writings. It is in three sections, each concerned with one of the subgroupings into which the volume’s chapters divide: first, the five chapters which treat Addison’s most definitive works, The Tatler, The Spectator, and Cato; then the four which deal with his works (now largely neglected) in verse and prose before The Spectator; and finally the five which assess his reception and influence in Britain and Europe from the eighteenth century through Romanticism to the Victorian age. This collection of essays, the first ever published on Addison that covers his career as a whole (rather than just the literary periodicals), reminds us of the range and variety of his work and of the correspondingly diverse responses it has occasioned through the ages. In doing so, the Introduction argues, it should help loosen the hold of the narrower conception of Addison as moral exemplar and epitome of bourgeois civility, deriving from partial constructions of The Spectator and Cato, which once underpinned his fame but now drastically imperils it.

Controversies in the Periodical Press

This chapter argues that the periodical medium played a fundamental role in the construction of literary cosmopolitanism as a discursive phenomenon. It focuses on two periodicals launched in the fin de siècle: the American Cosmopolitan and the European Cosmopolis. The commercially oriented and middle-brow Cosmopolitan promoted cosmopolitanism as a female-gendered social identity linked to class privilege, as testified by the serialization of Elizabeth Bisland’s round-the-world trip in 1889. However, it also interrogated the cosmopolitan tendencies of modern American literature embodied by the writings of Henry James. By contrast, the short-lived Cosmopolis was a high-brow periodical that aimed to revive Kant’s Enlightenment ideal and Goethe’s notion of world literature. It was committed to multilingualism and to fighting nationalism. The chapter closes with an analysis of Cosmopolis as a competitor to the iconic 1890s English literary periodicals, the Yellow Book and The Savoy.

Periodicals in Chile during the Government of Salvador Allende and the Dictatorship

Periodicals have been a significant part of Chile’s cultural history. Groups and networks of writers, intellectuals, and artists have orbited around literary and cultural periodicals with the aim of disseminating cultural and aesthetic projects. The study of periodicals addresses dialogues that have moved from the specificities of their disciplinary practice to political and social contexts. Reconstructing the trajectory of periodicals allows for the articulation of a dialogue with the voices that congregate in them to propose, question, and harbor specific currents capable of intervening in the configuration of the disciplines, the theoretical and cultural guidelines that determine an era. Dialogues that at certain junctures can transcend this resonance and expand considerably. The history of Chile as read through cultural and literary periodicals reveals the concerns that the cultural and artistic debate promoted during two distinct periods: during the Unidad Popular project, led by the government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), and its interruption with the coup d’état that initiated one of the bloodiest and most extensive dictatorships in Latin America (1973–1990). These concerns were articulated within a decisive collaboration of artists and writers during the Unidad Popular and altered under the persecution and rupture with the state during the dictatorship. In these two moments the journals opened debates and proposed and discussed ideas from a specific historical time, along with problematizing the exercise of their intellectual practice and reflecting on the disciplinary limits that sustain them. The analysis of the trajectory of periodicals in the cultural history of Chile recognizes the social, political, and cultural transformations of these two moments in the history of Chile.

Contemporary poetry book reviews: quantitative analysis

The work displays progress and results of the quantitative study of poetry book reviews published in the Russian-language literary periodicals in recent years (2014–2019). We describe the method of material selection (chronological framework, range of sources – literary and philological journals, newspapers, – criteria for selection of literary-critical texts), the method of calculating the volume of material. We give the main quantitative characteristics of the received corpus: total number and total volume of texts, average annual number and volume, average volume of one review (calculated both for the entire array and separately for review-digest – bibliographic leaflets), number of reviewers, number of sources. All sources, which are 46 literary publications, are divided into three groups, depending on the published volume of reviews. The work contains a brief description of these publications in connection with the review activity: the presence and fea-tures of literary-critical strategy, rubrication, etc. The appendices to the work provide detailed quantitative data. The research collects a significant corpus of texts (more than 400 a. s.) describ-ing and analyzing contemporary Russian poetry. The quantitative data obtained for the first time helps to form a relevant scientific picture of “who makes Russian literature today”.

Albanian Literature in Its Critical Evaluation Process. Case Study: Periodicals

The aim of this article is to analyze the process of evaluation of Albanian literature in literary periodicals (print or online). The research aims to explain the nature of criticism of Albanian literature in accordance with three main periods of Albanian literary history (1920–1944; 1945–1990; 1991–present). The paper has a short chronological presentation of the main periodicals which deal with literature. It also deals with the reception of Albanian literature in old and new periodicals. Some of the most important research questions of this paper are: Is there a continuation in the critical approaches to Albanian literature from the beginning to the present? Do critics have a ‘critical’ interaction between them while they express their evaluation regarding literature? Who are the critics? Which is the core role of certain critics and periodicals? The methodology used in this paper embraces a historical, analytical, statistical and interpretative approach. The paper will be developed in two parallel sections. The first one will elaborate quantitatively official data related to the number of periodicals which deal with the evaluation of literature in its theoretical and critical aspects and the other section will describe, analyze and interpret the data. The research results tend to prove that the process of critical evaluation of Albanian literature has experienced similar characteristics with Albanian literature itself. The critical reflection or criticism has turned out to be a refracting process. The critical evaluations are marred occasionally by low levels of professionalism or political interference.

Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.