Helps scholars to examine historical press censorship in England. This title draws together around 500 texts, reaching across 140 years from the rigours of the Elizabethan Star Chamber Decree to the publication of "Cato's Letters", which famously advanced principles of free speech.
Helps scholars to examine historical press censorship in England. This title draws together around 500 texts, reaching across 140 years from the rigours of the Elizabethan Star Chamber Decree to the publication of "Cato's Letters", which famously advanced principles of free speech.
Helps scholars to examine historical press censorship in England. This title draws together around 500 texts, reaching across 140 years from the rigours of the Elizabethan Star Chamber Decree to the publication of "Cato's Letters", which famously advanced principles of free speech.
Helps scholars to examine historical press censorship in England. This title draws together around 500 texts, reaching across 140 years from the rigours of the Elizabethan Star Chamber Decree to the publication of "Cato's Letters", which famously advanced principles of free speech.
How can the news business be re-envisioned in a rapidly changing world? Can market incentives and technological imperatives provide a way forward? How important have been the institutional arrangements that protected the production and distribution of news in the past? Making News charts the institutional arrangements that news providers in Britain and America have relied on since the late seventeenth century to facilitate the production and distribution of news. It is organized around eight original essays: each written by a distinguished specialist, and each explicitly comparative. Seven chapters survey the shifting institutional arrangements that facilitated the production and distribution of news in Britain and America in the period between 1688 and 1995. An eighth chapter surveys the news business following the commercialization of the Internet, while the epilogue links past, present, and future. Its theme is the indispensability in both Great Britain and the United States of non-market institutional arrangements in the provisioning of news. Only rarely has advertising revenue and direct sales covered costs. Almost never has the demand for news generated the revenue necessary for its supply. The presumption that the news business can flourish in a marketplace of ideas has long been a civic ideal. In practice, however, the emergence of a genuinely competitive marketplace for the production and distribution of news has limited the resources for high-quality news reporting. For the production of high-quality journalism is a byproduct less of the market, than of its supersession. And, in particular, it has long depended on the acquiescence of lawmakers in market-limiting business strategies that have transformed journalism in the past, and that will in all likelihood transform it once again in the future.
Enforcing and Eluding Censorship: British and Anglo-Italian Perspectives brings together a wide range of current work on literary, cultural and linguistic censorship by a team of fifteen contributors working in Italy, Britain and continental Europe. Censorship can take hold of a written text before or after its public appearance; it can strike the cultural item, as well as the very individual/s who created it; it can also catch in its net the agents responsible for its publication and diffusion (in the case of a printed text, authors, editors, printers, publishers, librarians and booksellers). It can be directed against a single person or against a group, an organization, a political party, or a religious confession. The different “ways of censorship” – how it was enforced or eluded in the Italian or Anglo-American worlds, and often in their mutual relations – are the topic of this volume, whose contents are divided into two main sections. The first, entitled “Discourse Regulation”, discusses instances of institutionalized and regulatory censorship and, conversely, forms of reaction against pressure and control. The second section, entitled “Textual and Ideological Manipulations”, debates some of the ways in which cultural products can be used to exert censorial influence upon society; among these, it shows how language and descriptions of language may provide a biased view of reality. All in all, the chapters in this volume highlight a notion of censorship that defies strict boundaries and definitions, thus challenging received ideas on cultural practices.
The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship offers a thorough exploration of the debates surrounding this contentious topic, considering the importance placed upon it in democratic societies and the reasons frequently proposed for limiting and constraining it. This volume addresses the various historical, philosophical, political and cultural parameters of censorship and freedom of expression as well as current debates involving technology, journalism and media regulation. Geographically, temporally and culturally diverse accounts of censorship and freedom of expression are discussed through a broad range of perspectives and case studies. This Companion covers core principles and concerns in addition to more specialist and controversial debates, including those surrounding hate speech, holocaust denial, pornography and so-called ‘cancel culture’. The collection pays particular attention to the role of the media in both facilitating and suppressing freedom of expression. Comprehensive, original and timely, The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship is a go-to resource for scholars and advanced students of media, communication and journalism studies.
In religious reforms, books and other forms of written communication play a dominant role, both for individuals as well as for groups. Covering the period from the late Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century, the chapters of this volume reflect on the use of books in religious reform movements and their impact on lay people and monastic communities. For those committed to religious renewal, books are the necessary and often enthusiastically welcomed vehicles for the transmission of religious reform concepts. They are at the same time often the objects of severe opposition and negative reactions in attempts at hindering or reversing religious reform for others. The researchers make use of approaches from cultural history, book history and English studies, among others. Contributions range from theory and practices of religious reform with special regard to the interaction between the laity and religious orders in their search for models of 'good religious living' to research on the changing processes of communication from manuscript to print and their impact on religious renewal.
Jonathan Swift lived through a period of turbulence and innovation in the evolution of the book. His publications, perhaps more than those of any other single author, illustrate the range of developments that transformed print culture during the early Enlightenment. Swift was a prolific author and a frequent visitor at the printing house, and he wrote as critic and satirist about the nature of text. The shifting moods of irony, complicity and indignation that characterise his dealings with the book trade add a layer of complexity to the bibliographic record of his published works. The essays collected here offer the first comprehensive, integrated survey of that record. They shed new light on the politics of the eighteenth-century book trade, on Swift's innovations as a maker of books, on the habits and opinions revealed by his commentary on printed texts and on the re-shaping of the Swiftian book after his death.
The development of printing practices during Tudor rule led both to the dissemination of religious and secular knowledge, and the development of a legal arsenal to control it. While the vast majority of studies on censorship regard it as being at the origin of the notion of authorship, critics tend to disagree on its actual influence on early modern writings. Who, among the Church and the secular state, were its main supporters? Did it aim at destroying or removing, punishing or protecting, hampering or regulating? Did it propagate a culture of secrecy or, on the contrary, did it help to circulate new ideas and knowledge by controlling them and making them more acceptable to the masses? If the answers to these questions are bound to differ according to the aesthetic and religious biases of both censors and censored, they all lead to one major point of debate: did censorship really work to stop some marginal threat or did it simply improve the lot of early modern writers who turned its limited negative effects into a comforting shield of self-publicity? By suggesting it suppressed neither artistic creativity nor subversive practices, this volume analyses censorship in Britain and Ireland during the Tudor and Stuart periods as an instrument of regulation, rather than a repressive tool. Ideal for both graduate students and general readers interested in Early Modern History, the work sheds new light on a topic as fascinating as it is often misunderstood.