Cutting Edges: Professional Hierarchy vs. Creative Identity in Nicolas de Launay’s Fine Art Prints

In 1783, Nicolas De Launay copied Les Baignets by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, stating it was made “by his very humble and very obedient servant”, an evidence of the hierarchical tensions between painters and printmakers during the eighteenth-century. However, De Launay’s loyalty is not absolute, since a critical artistic statement is found at the edge: an illusory oval frame heavily adorned with leaves and fruits of Squash, Hazelnuts, and Oak. This paper wishes to acknowledge this meticulously engraved frame, and many more added to copies throughout De Launay’s successful career, as highly relevant in examining his ‘obedience’ and ‘humbleness’. With regard to eighteenth-century writings on botany and authenticity, and to current studies on the print market, I offer a new perspective in which engravers are appreciated as active commercial artists establishing an individual signature style. In their conceptual and physical marginality these decorations allow creative freedom which challenges concepts of art appropriation and reproduction, highly relevant then and today.

The Implied Masturbator Speaks

This chapter builds on the material and technological transformations described in the previous chapter to discuss changing ideas about sexual representations. The chapter begins to directly talk about the desires of the implied masturbator. From the late Qing into the early twentieth century, mass media conquered the Chinese cultural world. Ambitious intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century increasingly put their ideas onto a print market that was more open than ever before. The chapter analyses how literary professionalization remained a deviation from the orthodox path of officialdom. It also elaborates the five aspects of ideological change around sex and sexual representations at the turn of the twentieth century. Many of these ideological transformations were led by political and cultural reformers, including proponents of a “New Culture.” These self-declared iconoclasts argued for revising the boundaries of legitimacy around desire itself. Ultimately, the chapter introduces the downfall of Zhang Jingsheng, a leading member of the New Culture group. The chapter addresses how Zhang's open discussion of his personal desires made him vulnerable to becoming seen as no better than an implied masturbator.

Heroism in Victorian Periodicals 1850–1900

Nineteenth century Britain was an age of rapid technological, political and societal change. This was also reflected in the media: Industrially-produced print media opened a mass market with publications for almost any (niche-) interest one could think of. The societal changes also resulted in a growing need for orientation which in many publications was answered using the semantics of the heroic. As guiding figures, heroes were supposed to offer role models for a variety different readerships. By analysing Chambers’s Journal, Fraser’s Magazine and Leisure Hour, this study analyses different conceptions of the heroic on the Victorian print market and shows how the heroic was used for different didactic, social and political purposes in addressing different readerships within the context of changing power structures.

Epistolary Liveness: Narrative Presence and the Victorian Actress in Letters

In an influential essay on the place of autobiography in theatre history, Thomas Postlewait puts Fanny Kemble's memoirs at the crux of a historiographical problem. The literary sensibility of Kemble's work appears to Postlewait an instance of both the theatrical memoir's cultural richness and its limitations as biographical evidence: although Kemble's “epistolary mode of self-representation” gives her autobiography Records of a Girlhood “a documentary quality,” for example, even her “earliest letters reveal a calculated literary style” that signals her awareness of the “traits and conventions” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. In her consciousness of narrative trends, Kemble stands out as a particularly clear example of a general tendency in theatrical autobiographies of the period. As the nineteenth century's booming print market expanded the audience for stories about theatregoing, it also drew readers who were increasingly familiar with novelistic experiments in plotting, characterization, and point of view. This shared audience encouraged an exchange of discursive conventions across fictional and historical narratives, which makes memoirs a compelling but complicated source of historical data about nineteenth-century theatre. Indeed, the two-way influence between genres is so strong that Postlewait argues scholars “need to ask to what extent these autobiographies exist not only as historical records but as epistolary fictions.”

Lend Us Your Earbuds: Shakespeare/Podcasting/Poesis

Podcasts by nature break down traditional economic barriers to making and accessing content. With low costs to both distribute and access, does podcasting provide a new outlet for academics, practitioners, and audiences to explore typically “high-minded” art or scholarly discussions usually blocked by the price of a theater ticket or a subscription to a paywalled database? To answer these questions, we define a poetics of podcasting—one that encourages humanities thinking par excellence—and, more importantly, carries with it implications for humanities studies writ large. To think in terms of poetics of podcasting shifts attention to the study of how we can craft, form, wright, and write for and with different communities both inside and outside the academy. In examining the current field of Shakespeare studies and podcasting, we argue podcasting incorporates elements ranging from the “slow” professor movement, to composition studies, to the early modern print market, discussing different methods that are both inspired by and disrupt traditional forms of knowledge production in the process.

Dis-locating Subaltern Therapeutics

The article is about totka chikitsha, a particular type of subaltern therapeutics widely recognized in northern and eastern South Asia. These simple recipes often circulated through transient encounters, physical or mediatized, between strangers. During the colonial era, government employment and the traveling that it required made many Bengalis in clerical jobs particularly authoritative in totka therapeutics. Though this mode of therapy was seen as an alternative to the increasingly commoditized medical market, anticonsumerism also became a discursive frame within which certain sections of the medico-print market appropriated totkas. My discussion of the colonial history of totka therapeutics is also intended as a critique of the persistent “localism” that haunts any attempt to engage, whether academically or practically, with subaltern therapeutics. I insist that we must historicize the local, the same way we now historicize the global.

GOTHIC FIELDING? PHILIP JAMES DE LOUTHERBOURG’S TOM JONES

This article confronts P.J. de Loutherbourg’s drawings of the selected scenes from Tom Jones with the possible “Gothic” content in Henry Fielding’s novel. Commenting on Fielding’s pictorialism, I argue that the most suitable scene from Tom Jones would have been the actual Gothic mansion of Mr. Allworthy, but the scene does not attract the illustrator’s attention. Then, I discuss de Loutherbourg’s patterns of Gothicizing the selected scenes in the manner of Salvator Rosa, which in the original depend on the mock-heroic or the grotesque. The article concludes with raising more general questions about the paradigms of de-contextualization and re-contextualization in late 18th century print market and book illustration.