Academic literature on the topic 'Large print fiction'

Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.

From its various beginnings in the nineteenth century and ever since the rise of print capitalism on the Indian subcontinent, the Urdu novel has become a prime medium of expression for writers seeking to fuse the narrative traditions of both the East and the West. As a hybrid genre which took shape during the nineteenth century, the Urdu novel's early beginnings were associated with the theme of historical romance; this eventually gave way to the influence of realism in the first half of the twentieth century. By and large, the Urdu novel incorporates influences encompassing the fantastical oral storytelling tradition of the dastan or the qissa (elaborate lengthy heroic tales of adventure, magic and honour), the masnavi (a form of narrative poem), Urdu grammars, religious pamphlets and journals, and the European novel.

Among the cultural forms of the Indian diaspora in the West, the radical obscurity of drama and theatre in comparison with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry suggests a complicated relation between genre, location, language, and experience. As a collaborative public medium theatre depends on material resources, institutional networks, and specific cultural contexts which place it at several removes from the privacy and relative self-sufficiency of print genres. Moreover, while novelists often employ diaspora as the enabling condition but not the subject of narrative, immigrant playwrights can create original theatre only when they distance themselves from their cultures of origin and embrace the experience of residence in the host culture, with all its attendant problems of acculturation and identity. In Canada, where the Indian immigrant communities are older, often visibly underprivileged, and entangled in post/colonial histories, an emergent culture of original playwriting and performance has offered a critique of the home-nation as well as of conditions in the diaspora. In the United States, in contrast, where large-scale immigration from India is relatively recent, socially privileged, and unencumbered by colonial baggage, original drama is virtually absent, and various forms of ‘travelling’ theatre dominate the culture of performance, reinforcing a powerful synonymy between ‘diaspora’ and ‘nation’. These two North American locations are paradigmatic examples, therefore, of the historically grounded interconnections between diaspora, nation, and theatre in the modern Indian context.

In the summer of 1850, there was a frisson of excitement in London society. Charlotte Brontë, the recently revealed writer of the best-selling novel Jane Eyre, was in the capital, staying with her publisher, George Smith. The highlight of Charlotte’s trip was a large, formal dinner hosted by her literary hero, William Makepeace Thackeray. To this august event it has long been assumed that she wore a floral print, white and blue delaine skirt and bodice. This article begins by examining the colloquially named ‘Thackeray Dress’ in detail, before considering the evidence given in support of it having been worn to the dinner on 12 June 1850. The style and fabric of the dress are then compared to others of the period and this is followed by an examination of contemporary sartorial conventions, and the extent of Charlotte Brontë’s adherence to them. Questions raised by these findings are then considered alongside reports that suggest the dress may not have been worn on this occasion. Published in the bicentenary year of Brontë’s birth, this study questions the validity of the garment’s association with the legendary Thackeray dinner and, in so doing, attempts to separate fact from fiction.

Digital text is quickly becoming essential to modern daily life. The article you are reading right now is born digital; unlike texts of the not-so-distant past, it may never be printed at all. Worldwide, the trend is clear: Digital text is on the way in, and print is on its way out. Year-by-year, more and more readers are turning to ebooks, internet news, and other forms of ereading, while generation by generation, print is becoming less and less relevant. 1 1 Pew research shows 50% of Americans have a dedicated ereading device, with yearly gains in ereadership [1]; industry research, too, shows a definite trend toward ereading and non-traditional publishing, with ebooks making up 50% of fiction reading in 2016 [2], while journalism is also trending online [3]. These trends are not unique to English—to meet the demands and expectations of today's readers, Tibetan texts, too, are being digitized by many organizations and institutions with a shared appreciation for the Tibetan literary heritage. They include a variety of secular publishers, monastic institutions, and Buddhist foundations, among others. But while these organizations share common goals for common texts, their work is all too frequently completely disconnected from the community at large. This situation negatively impacts what is already a minoritized and under-resourced language. While competition—from other languages, as well as other publishers in the Tibetan etext world—has been a driver of innovation in the adoption of ereading technology, we believe that a rich, shared data source is not only in everyone's best interest but also the only practical way forward when we consider the time, effort, expertise, and money that quality digitization takes. That is why we have designed OpenPecha to be a public, open platform for collaborative etext curation and annotation sharing. Its aim is providing a wide range of users with the latest version of the exact “view” of any text needed, while maintaining the integrity of the text and its annotations and simultaneously allowing for community improvements and additions. In this article, we explore the details of how the project came to be, what it is, and how it works, while also presenting a few common use cases.

Advertisings usually display thin bodies creating and endorsing the beauty standards of the society. Large body size models are sometimes featured in advertisings to show a more inclusive marketing communication. Previous researches have investigated consumer responses to more diverse body sizes in Beauty and Fashion industries ads. This paper aims at investigating advertisement effectiveness, for both print and digital advertisings, through consumer responses (Memorization, Aad, Ab, and Purchase Intention) to body sizes in food advertisements.
 
 We used a mixed design study with a between group factor (Media type: Print or Digital) and a within-subject variable (body shape: large, thin or no model), via a folder test procedure. Participants were exposed to a fictive magazine to measure their responses toward advertisements featuring large size model versus thin one. 
 
 The findings reveal that “large model” advertisements are less effective compared to “thin model” advertisements for Memorization, Attitude towards Ad, and Purchasing Intention. However, participants expressed the same Attitude towards the Brand for both conditions. Moreover, hardly any significant influence of the means of exposure to ads (printed or digital) was found. 
 
 Despite the latest consumer pertinacity trends on companies to adopt diversity for social reasons; consumers, of the food industry, are still better influenced by thin models when it comes to Memorization, Aad, and PI. 
 
 Furthermore, this study offers practical and societal implications not only for the experimental design, but also for practitioners to comprehend and utilize the match‐up hypothesis of body size condition needed for their marketing and advertising objectives.

A Review of:
 Maynard, S., Mackay, S., & Smyth, F. (2008). A survey of young people's reading in England: Borrowing and choosing books. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 40(4), 239-253.
 
 Objective – To analyze factors affecting book choice: reading recommendations, reasons for choosing series books, book reviews, and school libraries.
 
 Design – This secondary analysis of data is based on a selection of findings from a larger 2005 survey that monitored trends in youth reading habits. The large scale 2005 study was designed as a follow up to a 1996 survey. The 2005 survey used online questionnaires and formal statistical analysis to compare gender and age groups. The data on factors affecting book choice were derived from the original questions, responses, and analyses. 
 
 Setting – Questionnaires were administered in 
 22 primary and 24 secondary schools in the UK with access to computers and internet. 
 
 Subjects – Almost 4,200 students from 4 to 16 years of age.
 
 Methods – Study authors invited approximately 150 schools to participate in the survey. Forty-six schools (31%) responded. A total of 22 primary and 24 secondary schools participated in the original study between April and June 2005.
 
 This study used comparative analysis to examine factors affecting book choice between gender and age groups. Statistical significance was defined as one percent. Other demographic information was collected, such as ethnicity, language spoken at home, and religion, but was deemed insufficient for any meaningful analysis.
 
 There were 4,182 responses to the survey, separated into three age groups: ages 4 to 7 (KS1), ages 7 to 11 (KS2), and ages 11 to 16 (KS3&4). 
 
 Students were asked to describe themselves as readers by responding to multiple choice questions, and then to provide specific information on the places or people most frequently used as book borrowing sources. Participants were considered “enthusiastic” readers if they “read a lot with pleasure” and “average” readers if they “read an ordinary amount”. Participants responded to additional multiple choice questions on specific factors related to borrowing books and book choices, the process of choosing series, fiction, and nonfiction books.
 
 Main Results – Readers: The number of children who described themselves as “enthusiastic” readers decreased with age, and approximately half of the children between 7 and 16 years of age described themselves as “average” readers, average rating increasing slightly through this age group. Investigators found a marked difference in gender within the 4 to 7 year olds: 49.7% percent of girls in this age group considered themselves “enthusiastic,” compared to 37.3% of boys. Only 18.5% of girls considered themselves “reluctant” readers, compared to 28.1% of boys. 
 
 The longitudinal comparison to the earlier 1996 study found that although the percentage of boys from ages 7 to 16 who described themselves as reluctant readers stayed about the same, the percentage of girls who described themselves as reluctant increased. There was also a dramatic drop in the number of girls who described themselves as enthusiastic; from 51% in 1996 to 17% in 2005.
 
 Borrowing Books: Libraries of all types (school, classroom and public) were the prime sources for borrowing books. Girls borrowed more books from schools than boys, and girls also borrowed more books from non-library sources (family members and friends) than boys. Both boys and girls increasingly reported borrowing more books from friends than from libraries as they grew older.
 
 Over half of each age group rated the school library or classroom book corner as having “enough” books. The perception of “too many books” decreased with age. The perception of quality of the classroom or school library also decreased with age. The number of students in the younger age groups who rated the quality of books in the classroom or school library as “very good” was significantly higher than students in the older age groups. The number of student who rated the quality as “okay” doubled from the lower to the higher age group. 
 
 Choosing Books: Children were asked six questions related to whether the physical book itself provided motivation to read, and six questions related to other factors for book recommendation. Younger readers were more likely to choose a book for its visual appeal, although this factor (interesting cover or illustrations inside) was more consistent for boys of all age groups than girls. The author’s name and book blurb were stronger factors for girls in the 7 to 16 age group than for boys. 
 
 The study authors sought to explore the idea of “shared reading” and asked children in the 7 to 11 and 11 to 16 age groups how often they chose a book based on a recommendation from a friend or family member, a public or school librarian, or other adults. Friends were the strongest recommendation source (43.2% for 7 to 11 year olds and 38.4% for 11to 16 year olds). Recommendations from school or public librarians rated only three to six percent for both age groups. 
 
 All age groups were asked about choosing series books, and the questions were simplified for the younger age group. All students reported that appealing factors were the consistency of characters, familiar storylines, and familiar writing styles. Some students also noted that the availability of series books positively affected their choices.
 
 Print or online book reviews were used “hardly ever or never” by over 40% of the 7 to16 year old age groups, while television or magazine reviews or recommendations were highly rated by over 50% of respondents in the same age groups. Participants chose informational or non-fiction books because of personal interests, hobbies, or recommendations from friends, while they selected fiction or poetry for the blurb, title, or appearance and design of the cover. Celebrity recommendations and books about celebrities were popular reasons for choosing books. 
 
 When asked who helped them choose books, 53.2% in the 7 to11 age group and 66.1% in the 11to 16 age group stated that no one ever helps them. Of the students who had help choosing books, “family members” was the most common response. Local librarians were not used as a source for recommendations.

Abstract In 1701 Puritan minister John Rogers published the criminal narrative of Esther Rodgers, who had been convicted of infanticide and executed. Esther Rodgers appears in Rogers’s Death the Certain Wages of Sin not as a depraved criminal or even a repentant sinner but as a courageous Christian martyr. Much of the productive recent scholarship on Rodgers studies the way her criminal status operated in the public sphere generally or print culture specifically, but the literary construction of her legal criminal status reveals a larger negotiation over marginalized individuals’ ability to consent and dissent in early New England and an unexpected orientation toward choice in early American literature. Rogers and his contemporaries engaged the conventions of the early modern criminal narrative to organize the chaos of maternal tragedy according to fictions of choice and the conventions of ancient and antique scripture to recast execution as a prelude to salvation. But in the ill-fitting spaces between the criminal’s story and the forms to which these authors suited it, readers could see a character who was something more—or less—than murderer or martyr: a sympathetic victim granted the ability to consent only in order to certify her legal culpability, religious conversion, and complicity in the macabre spectacle of her own public execution.

L’Argent des autres (1873) is not a “true” detective novel like Monsieur Lecoq (1868) written by the same author, Émile Gaboriau. The novel appeared in print eight years after the publication of L’Affaire Lerouge, the first French detective novel; however, there is no police investigation; the culprit is known from the first pages. Like his previous novels, La Dégringolade (1871–1872) and La Corde au cou (1872–1873), L’Argent des autres shows an evolution towards the novel of manners in which Gaboriau reveals the failures of the society of his time. Thus, the novel depicts a dark picture of Parisian finance. Furthermore, if there is a criminal in this serial novel, it is a woman! Gaboriau takes his reader into the viscera of the world of money and discloses the social mechanics of those who live off the money of others. Gaboriau denounces the appetites of the morally corrupt society through the description of fictional spaces, such as the Comptoir de crédit mutuel, the office of the newspaper Le Pilote financier, the office of the speculator Lattermann, on the one hand, and of actual emblematic places such as the Bourse, the large boulevards or the Bois de Boulogne on the other

This paper looks at the actresses who portrayed Darna and how they are presented as spectacles in the entertainment articles that promote the film and television adaptations. This frame of inquiry comes from the notion that the visual aesthetics of Darna in komiks is largely informed by the superhero genre’s dependence on spectacle as shown in the superhero’s feats of greatness and in her actions and movements which are all larger than life and extraordinary. If this is the case for Darna in print, then how about the actresses tasked with performing her in the movies and television series? How are their bodies being turned into a spectacle in promotional materials in order to conform to the needs of the capital (entertainment industry)? In using the spectacle of the body as framework, the paper also draws on the star system and the role of producers of text in the creation of Darna as we know her today. The aim is to reveal how female bodies were made part of the construction of Darna’s image outside of its fictional universe which results in a discourse that highlights the body of the celebrities rather than Darna’s continuing relevance as a Filipino icon. This sets aside her representational power to embody the struggle and demand of Filipinos for justice and a better life as audience’s attention is diverted towards how these actresses prepared their bodies to perform Darna.