Digital technology and the Internet have revolutionized film criticism, programming, and preservation in deeply paradoxical ways. The Internet allows almost everyone to participate in critical discourse, but many print publications and salaried positions for professional film critics have been eliminated. Digital technologies have broadened access to filmmaking capabilities, as well as making thousands of older films available on DVD and electronically. At the same time, however, fewer older films can be viewed in their original celluloid format, and newer, digitally produced films that have no “material” prototype are threatened by ever-changing servers that render them obsolete and inaccessible.

Cineaste, one of the oldest and most influential publications focusing on film, has investigated these trends through a series of symposia with the top film critics, programmers, and preservationists in the United States and beyond. This volume compiles several of these symposia: “Film Criticism in America Today” (2000), “International Film Criticism Today” (2005), “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” (2008), “Film Criticism: The Next Generation” (2013), “The Art of Repertory Film Exhibition and Digital Age Challenges” (2010), and “Film Preservation in the Digital Age” (2011). It also includes interviews with the late, celebrated New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael and the critic John Bloom (“Joe Bob Briggs”), as well as interviews with the programmers/curators Peter von Bagh and Mark Cousins and with the film preservationist George Feltenstein. This authoritative collection of primary-source documents will be essential reading for scholars, students, and film enthusiasts.

Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and literary critics.

While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women’s unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, Phegley argues that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics. Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper’s), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines. She argues that these publications supported women’s reading choices, inviting them to define literary culture rather than to consume it passively.

Not only does this book revise our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women readers, but it also takes a fresh look at the transatlantic context of literary production. Further, Phegley demonstrates the role these publications played in improving cultural literacy among women of the middle classes as well as the interplay between fiction and essays of the time by writers such as Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Sala, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.

A comprehensive study of evangelical magazine discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and how it navigated and sustained religious convictions in a time of dramatic social change

The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in US history. In tandem with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism, abortion, birth control, and restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. During this time, there was a surge in readership for evangelical periodicals such as Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners as well as the feminist newsletter Daughters of Sarah.

While each of these magazines—and other publications and media—contributed to and participated in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they also had their own outlooks and political leanings concerning hot-button issues. In Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, Anja-Maria Bassimir presents a nuanced view of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century through the lens of the movement’s own media.

Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. To accomplish this, Evangelical News traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters investigate such topics as how evangelicals reenvisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement, the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence, and the place of evangelicals as political actors.


 

Finalist for the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize

During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines—like Delhi Press’s Saritā—and the first paperbacks in Hindi—Hind Pocket Books—North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion.

Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices—particularly those of women—Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.

On a sweltering day in June 1974, a group of housewives, graduate students, and young professionals gathered in the Boston suburbs. Their mission: to produce the first issue of Exponent II, a “humble yet sincere” newspaper “poised on the dual platforms of Mormonism and Feminism.” They viewed their work as an act of devotion, not rebellion, and were naïve of the cold reception they would soon receive from LDS Church leaders. Nevertheless, the paper became a national platform connecting Mormon feminists. It provided a vital space for them to question and integrate different aspects of their dual—and sometimes dueling—identities. From the Equal Rights Amendment to queer identity, Exponent II has hosted some of the most urgent conversations of its time while also embracing life’s dailiness.

In this issue

Hong Kong Unraveled: Social Media and the 2019 Protest Movement
Anonymous

Unleashing the Sounds of Silence: Hong Kong’s Story in Troubled Times
Andrea Riemenschnitter

Tragedy of Errors at Warp Speed
Sam Ho

Imagining a City-Based Democracy: Review of The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement by Laikwan Pang, University of Michigan Press, 2020
Enoch Tam

China and the Film Festival
Richard Peña

Nationalism from Below: State Failures, Nollywood, and Nigerian Pidgin Jonathan Haynes Collective Memory and the Rhetorical Power of the Historical Fiction Film
Carl Plantinga

From Nations to Worlds: Chris Marker’s Si j’avais quatre dromadaires
Michael Walsh

American Factory and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism
Peter Hitchcock

R.I.P. Soft Power: China’s Story Meets the Reset Button: Review of Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds edited by Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhu, Routledge, 2019
Robert A. Kapp

Review: On Epidemics, Epidemiology, and Global Storytelling
Carlos Rojas

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write “the other way,” working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the combined sales of his most well known novels, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man.

In Herman Melville Graham Thompson examines the author's magazine work in its original publication context, including stories that became classics, such as “Bartelby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” alongside lesser-known work. Using a concept he calls “embedded authorship,” Thompson explores what it meant to be a magazine writer in the 1850s and discovers a new Melville enmeshed with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions. He reveals how Melville responded to the practical demands of magazine writing with dazzling displays of innovation that reinvented magazine traditions and helped create the modern short story.

Media platforms continually evolve, but the issues surrounding media representations of gender and sexuality have persisted across decades. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism has published groundbreaking articles on gender and sexuality, including some that have become canonical in film studies, since the journal’s founding in 1982. This anthology collects seventeen key articles that will enable readers to revisit foundational concerns about gender in media and discover models of analysis that can be applied to the changing media world today.

Spectatorship begins with articles that consider issues of spectatorship in film and television content and audience reception, noting how media studies has expanded as a field and demonstrating how theories of gender and sexuality have adapted to new media platforms. Subsequent articles show how new theories emerged from that initial scholarship, helping to develop the fields of fandom, transmedia, and queer theory. The most recent work in this volume is particularly timely, as the distinctions between media producers and media spectators grow more fluid and as the transformation of media structures and platforms prompts new understandings of gender, sexuality, and identification. Connecting contemporary approaches to media with critical conversations of the past, Spectatorship thus offers important points of historical and critical departure for discussion in both the classroom and the field.