Andrew King

Victorian culture was dominated by an ever expanding world of print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers, and periodicals, was matched by the corresponding development of the first mass reading public. Victorian Print Media: A Reader consists of edited extracts from nineteenth-century sources which discuss all aspects of the production and circulation of print media. The extracts are organised into themed sections such as authorship and journalism, reading spaces, and the influence of print.

Victorian culture was dominated by an ever expanding world of print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers, and periodicals, was matched by the corresponding development of the first mass reading public. It has long been acknowledged that the growth of the popular publishing industry played an instrumental role in the success of most major Victorian novelists. Traditional critical positions have, nevertheless, recently expanded into a much broader field concerned with media history, book studies, modes of textual production and consumption, and concepts of 'popular literature'. One of most notable current critical trends is a renewed interest in the importance of all aspects of nineteenth-century print culture. Victorian Print Media: A Reader collects primary sources from nineteenth century journals, newspapers, and periodicals into an anthology that can be used for teaching purposes, but is also intended to complement and encourage ongoing research. The extracts are organised into ten themed sections. Each section addresses a specific conceptual or historical issue, such as the impact of serial publication upon practices of reading and authorship. The themed sections demonstrate the multiple factors upon which the aesthetics of print media depended, making this anthology of use to all researchers, teachers, and students of the period.

This book is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read publications of nineteenth-century Britain, the London Journal, over a period when mass-market reading in a modern sense was born. Treating the magazine as a case study, the book maps the Victorian mass-market periodical in general and provides both new bibliographical and theoretical knowledge of this area. Andrew King argues the necessity for an interdisciplinary vision that recognises that periodicals are commodities that occupy specific but constantly unstable places in a dynamic cultural field. He elaborates the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest a model of cultural 'zones' where complex issues of power are negotiated through both conscious and unconscious strategies of legitimation and assumption by consumers and producers. He also critically engages with cultural theory as well as traditional scholarship in history, art history, and literature, combining a political economic approach to the commodity with an aesthetic appreciation of the commodity as fetish. Previous commentators have coded the mass market as somehow always 'feminine', and King offers a genealogy of how such a gender identity came about. Fundamentally, however, the author relies on new and extensive primary research to ground the changing ways in which the reading public became consumers of literary commodities on a scale never before seen. Finally, King recontextualizes within the Victorian mass market three key novels of the time - Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (serialised in the London Journal 1859-60), Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1863), and a previously unknown version of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise (1883) - and in so doing he lends them radically new and unexpected meanings.

Accretion Power in Astrophysics examines accretion as a source of energy in both binary star systems containing compact objects, and in active galactic nuclei. Assuming a basic knowledge of physics, the authors describe the physical processes at work in accretion discs and other accretion flows. The first three chapters explain why accretion is a source of energy, and then present the gas dynamics and plasma concepts necessary for astrophysical applications. The next three chapters then develop accretion in stellar systems, including accretion onto compact objects. Further chapters give extensive treatment of accretion in active galactic nuclei, and describe thick accretion discs. A new chapter discusses recently discovered accretion flow solutions. The third edition is greatly expanded and thoroughly updated. New material includes a detailed treatment of disc instabilities, irradiated discs, disc warping, and general accretion flows. The treatment is suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers.

Scholarship on Middle English romance has done little to access the textual and bibliographical continuity of this remarkable literary tradition into the sixteenth century and its impact on Elizabethan works. And to an even greater extent Spenserian scholarship has failed to investigate the significant and complex debts which The Faerie Queene owes to medieval native verse romance and Malorys Le Morte Darthur. This book accordingly offers the first comprehensive study of the impact of Middle English romance on The Faerie Queene. It employs the concept of memory, in which both Middle English romance writers and Spenser show specific interest, to build a sense of the thematic, generic, and cultural complexity of the native romance tradition. The memorial character of Middle English romance resides in its intertextuality and its frequent presentation of its narrative events as historical and consequently the basis for a favourable sense of local or even national identity. Spensers memories of native romance involve a more troubled engagement with that tradition of providential national history as well as an endeavour to see in pre-Reformation romance a prophetic and objective authority for Protestant belief.

Analyses of political dialogue have traditionally concentrated on structures of government or social movements, drawing clear boundaries between the individual and the state. In its examination of the marginal fringe groups struggling to secure power, Postmodern Political Communication broadens our conception of political behavior and places new emphasis on the generation and invention of politics. This volume's contributors examine the discourse of deviant, oppressed, and powerless groups from the point of view of empowerment; that is, how do such outsider groups engage the center and how are they able to use mass media to gain political power? The authors study the discourse of those who seem most alienated from the formal political process: religious cults, youth gangs, submerged culture groups, and illegal aliens. Their analyses concentrate on the ways in which postmodern discourse legitimizes distribution of power in the social order, and disclose the ideological and political messages that underlie ordinary nonpolitical expression. With its explorations of communicative theory and implications for praxis, this work will appeal to a large audience of scholars and practitioners in political science and communications.