Suchergebnisse

The reader who turns to Rudyard Kipling with twenty-first political sensibilities finds a work replete with the orientalism and reductionist 'othering' that typifies colonial writing during the period of high Empire. Not least in its superficial treatment of the lives it claims to represent, such reductionism can be traced to the mind of the author and, deeper still, the political-economic culture that structured imperial thinking and informed its actions. Such a view is made possible by our twenty-first century advantage. Even so, clarity in one perspective typically entails indistinctness in another, and for this reason this essay proposes to start from a provocative hypothesis. If we temporarily deny ourselves this interpretative perspective, is it possible for us to learn more about the reading experience of Kipling's contemporaries and their particular role in circulating his texts? What, in other words, do Kipling's short tales reveal about those other readers, the readers who can be considered as actors engaged in creating publishing and reception history? Taking 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes' (1885) as its focus, this essay offers a close reading of Kipling's short story within the context of the proliferation of magazine short stories in the late-Victorian period. Rather than seeking to produce a contemporary meaning from the text, it seeks to reveal the less obvious home-grown phantoms which Kipling's story produced for its first audiences.

Critical literature studies tend not to think about readers as customers and consumers or, in economic terms, end-users. From the Frankfurt School to World Literature, those critical studies have little to say about fiction from the viewpoint of readers as commercial actors aware of their participation in and construction of the market. But book retail, both online and off, remains the frame in which book-purchasing choices are made. To understand the hopes and desires of those readers, would it not make sense to ask them? Using the High Street bookshop as a metonymic site for reading within commodity culture, this article will present findings from a national survey with a corpus of 530 responses into expectations from purchased books. To ask what is expected from a book just purchased is simple, banal even, but collectively the answers to it can take the first tentative steps towards a political theory of reading, not from without, but from within our dominant economic frame.

The reader who turns to Rudyard Kipling with twenty-first political sensibilities finds a work replete with the orientalism and reductionist 'othering' that typifies colonial writing during the period of high Empire. Not least in its superficial treatment of the lives it claims to represent, such reductionism can be traced to the mind of the author and, deeper still, the political-economic culture that structured imperial thinking and informed its actions. Such a view is made possible by our twenty-first century advantage. Even so, clarity in one perspective typically entails indistinctness in another, and for this reason this essay proposes to start from a provocative hypothesis. If we temporarily deny ourselves this interpretative perspective, is it possible for us to learn more about the reading experience of Kipling's contemporaries and their particular role in circulating his texts? What, in other words, do Kipling's short tales reveal about those other readers, the readers who can be considered as actors engaged in creating publishing and reception history? Taking 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes' (1885) as its focus, this essay offers a close reading of Kipling's short story within the context of the proliferation of magazine short stories in the late-Victorian period. Rather than seeking to produce a contemporary meaning from the text, it seeks to reveal the less obvious home-grown phantoms which Kipling's story produced for its first audiences.

Abstract
The JS Group is the business home to the prize-winning chain of booksellers for higher education institutions, John Smith's. Under the deceptively simple term 'bookseller', however, lies a shift in thinking about books published by John Smith's, which deserves articulation. This shift moves from regarding books as a source of knowledge conveyed through the book's text to books as an agency capable of producing a range of notably different outcomes, of which knowledge is one, for each of the actors involved in its book-retail network. Through their aggregated engagement with what Darnton calls the communications circuit, John Smith's manages to deliver different outcomes for students, lecturers, parents, student support services, for university executive management and for the state. These outcomes are only heightened when combined with Smith's smart card system, sometimes called ASPIRE. In conjunction with a Samsung tablet, ASPIRE is then able to deliver 'free' digitized learning, funded through the UK fair access bursaries. The article examines John Smith's model and questions the trade-off between effectiveness and freedom, finding the alternatives to be wanting. The research emerges from ongoing work into reading within the frame of commodity culture and, as such, the disciplinary fields supporting it are sociologies of literature, economics and book history studies, expressed in terms of cultural and critical discourse. The combination, it is hoped, will provide a fresh perspective.

Preliminary Material -- Differentiated Teaching and Learning in Youth Work Training -- Can Youth Workers Work with Young People? Philosophical Perspective in Youth Work -- Section 1: Working with Young People -- Section 2: Working with young people – A contra perspective -- Section 3: Alternative Perspectives -- Section 4: Practical perspectives of working with and on young people–is it possible for youth workers to work with young people? -- Section 5: Perspectives of Ethical Theory on Working on Young People -- Section 6: Conclusion.

Abstract
This companion piece to 'Bespoke Bookselling for the twenty-first century: John Smith's and current UK higher education' (also in this issue of Book 2.0) provides a historical narrative of the bookshop chain John Smith's. From its emergence in Glasgow in the 1750s, through its negotiation of the Net Book Agreement around 1900 and its strategies for survival and growth after the agreement's collapse in the digital era, the article provides the only comprehensive history of this unique book retail business up to the present day. What is apparent is that its current diverse business model has a clear historical precedence. Their business involvements have included publishing, circulating libraries, library and learning material supply, creation of cultural events, transitioning from local to global and, especially, cooperation with higher education. John Smith's is a perfect example of how bookselling was and is far more than simply the activity of selling books.