Results by title

Before news organizations began putting their content online, people got the news in print or on TV and almost always outside of the workplace. But nowadays, most of us keep an eye on the headlines from our desks at work, and we have become accustomed to instant access to a growing supply of constantly updated stories on the Web. This change in the amount of news available as well as how we consume it has been coupled with an unexpected development in editorial labor: rival news organizations can now keep tabs on the competition and imitate them, resulting in a decrease in the diversity of the news. Peeking inside the newsrooms where journalists create stories and the work settings where the public reads them, Pablo J. Boczkowski reveals why journalists contribute to the growing similarity of news—even though they dislike it—and why consumers acquiesce to a media system they find increasingly dissatisfying.

Comparing and contrasting two newspapers in Buenos Aires with similar developments in the United States, News at Work offers an enlightening perspective on living in a world with more information but less news.

A collection of field-defining essays on the Victorian novel, taking up a fascinating paradox in literary history: why do we care so deeply about fictional characters who don’t really exist?

n Nobody Comes of Age, Catherine Gallagher explores the Victorian novel by examining its most fundamental building block: the fictional character. Gallagher argues that “Nobodies”—nonreferential, yet realistic, invented personae, usually of middling social status—were the very engine of the genre’s development. Having arrived on the fictional scene in the eighteenth century, Nobody came of age during the Victorian era. The novel achieved cultural hegemony, and Victorian novelists explored these characters’ fictionality in tandem with the great intellectual developments of their time. Readers, knowing well that novel personae were not portraits of actual individuals, nevertheless expected them to yield important insights into the social and cultural changes of the age.

Nobody Comes of Age gathers in revised form a selection of Catherine Gallagher’s classic and still influential essays on the Victorian novel. These essays take up topics such as the relationship between fiction and the decline of religious belief in the period, and how novelists worked the tension between characters who seemed typical and plots that were unpredictable. Gallagher expertly navigates across a range of canonical texts, from the ordinary outcomes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to the archetypal sacrifices in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. For scholars and students of nineteenth-century British literature, Nobody Comes of Age is an essential companion.

Winner of the 2016 Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award and the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award
Americans tend to imagine their public libraries as time-honored advocates of equitable access to information for all. Through much of the twentieth century, however, many black Americans were denied access to public libraries or allowed admittance only to separate and smaller buildings and collections. While scholars have examined and continue to uncover the history of school segregation, there has been much less research published on the segregation of public libraries in the Jim Crow South. In fact, much of the writing on public library history has failed to note these racial exclusions.

In Not Free, Not for All, Cheryl Knott traces the establishment, growth, and eventual demise of separate public libraries for African Americans in the South, disrupting the popular image of the American public library as historically welcoming readers from all walks of life. Using institutional records, contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles, and other primary sources together with scholarly work in the fields of print culture and civil rights history, Knott reconstructs a complex story involving both animosity and cooperation among whites and blacks who valued what libraries had to offer. African American library advocates, staff, and users emerge as the creators of their own separate collections and services with both symbolic and material importance, even as they worked toward dismantling those very institutions during the era of desegregation.