Suchergebnisse

This article sets out to explore the emergence of reading and print cultures in Waterford over the period from the opening of the city's Free Public Library to the outbreak of the Second World War in the twentieth century. It is intended to add to the growing body of writing emerging on reading and books in Ireland by honing in on the development of a local reading culture in an era of more democratic access to books, periodicals and other printed matter. By surveying the development of various lending and circulation libraries up to the establishment of the Waterford Free Public Library in 1896 and beyond into the Free State era, the argument will be made that many of the concerns around self-improvement and literacy remained constant despite the shift from member-run libraries to municipal libraries and from Victorian concerns about moral self-improvement to early Irish state concerns about nation-building and Catholic morality in the 1920s and 1930s. The article will also explore the publishing and book trade in the city throughout the same period. This small but significant industry provided employment for some of the very people who were the target of self-improvement and concerns about their ability to consume 'morally dubious' literature.

This essay is a study of the woodblock print culture at Khê Hồi temple in Thường Tín district, Hà Tây province (belonging to present day Hà Nội), a temple that is located in the same area as two other temples addressed in this volume (Thắng Nghiêm temple and Phổ Nhân temple). After describing the temple's history and the various Buddhist schools that have influenced Khê Hồi temple, this essay proceeds to describe and analyze the temple's extant woodblock collection (over 700 plates, and many books), which was discovered in 2001. The essay goes on to examine the circulation of books printed from the temple's woodblock collection by means of: (1) comparing the temple's woodblocks with Buddhist texts in the collection of the Institute of Sino-Nôm Studies and (2) examining neighboring temples to determine whether or not they have preserved books printed from Khê Hồi temple's woodblocks. Through analyzing the history of woodblocks and their circulation pertaining to Khê Hồi temple in the context of nineteenth-century Buddhist woodblocks and texts in Northern Vietnam, this essay argues that Buddhism played a preponderant role in the creation and dissemination of printed texts in nineteenth-century Vietnam. During this period, although Buddhist print culture was already quite developed, the circulation of printed texts was largely limited to temples, and had not yet become widespread in secular society or the "public sphere" at large. This would later change during the "Buddhist Revival" of 1920–1945, when printing and print culture had already taken on their modern form.

Stories of transported criminals were exchanged in the print culture of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, creating images of the incorrigibility of transported criminals and of the failures of transportation, with many either re-offending in America or returning to do so in England. This discourse also framed images that each side of the Atlantic had of the other. The British learnt that the plantations were a place of slavery, the Americans that the British viewed them as a 'race of convicts'. This process, involving many layers of discourse in the criminal Atlantic, formed one of the earliest examples of international debates on crime and national identity.

The significant changes in the social, economic, and political conditions of Iran in the late Qajar era both precipitated and necessitated changes in cultural production. One way to better understand these shifting paradigms is through an examination of print culture. ᶜAbbas Mirza, the governor of Azerbaijan and a Qajar prince, has been credited with promoting and supporting the printing industry in Iran. In 1812, he oversaw the establishment of a printing house in Tabriz, and it was largely due to his influence that Tabriz became an important center of publishing. Jan Rypka noted that the first "printing business" in Iran was set up in Tabriz in the year 1824-25 but he believed the press to have been operational for only a decade before lithography overtook the printing enterprise. ᶜAbbas Mirza sent a group of students to England to study, the most notable being Mirza Salih Shirazi who was a student at Oxford University.