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The figure of Christopher Columbus was a key trope in the programming for the BBC's Latin American Service (LAS) and West Indian Service during the Second World War. This paper analyzes four dramas and one feature program from the 1940s that not only dramatize events from Columbus's life but also reflect the contemporary broadcast context by promoting British war interests and showcasing Latin American and Caribbean histories and geographies. These commemorative programs are broadly hagiographic, but they also reveal the BBC's awareness of how Latin American and West Indian audiences might variously respond to portrayals of Columbus and European colonization. Using radiogenic strategies including immersive aurality, the interplay of different historical narratives, and multivocality, these programs reveal the relationships between the BBC's institutional aims in overseas broadcasting and Latin American and West Indian program creators' literary and political goals. The portrayals of Columbus in the 1940s served an allegorical and ultimately propagandistic purpose, demonstrating the role of faith and perseverance amid turbulence and conflict, and inducing, by analogy, sympathy for Britain's war effort. The authors commissioned to write, produce, and deliver these dramas were not simply responding to propaganda guidelines; they were responding to the demands of the corporation and the war effort while also pursuing their own commitments and literary ambition. Ultimately, the scripts produced by the BBC for broadcast to the Americas reveal Columbus and his voyages as polysemic symbols of the regions' relationship to their past and their relationships to Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, British jazz fans and critics looking to better understand the genre stimulated a demand for blues records; this market expanded further as first Trad jazz, then skiffle and British R&B launched a British blues revival. Major labels like Decca and Pye offered major US urban blues and soul artists, but the specialty market, dominated by connoisseurs interested in a wider variety of artists and eras, was underserved by the major labels. Thus, committed blues lovers took matters into their own hands. This paper will survey the turbulent independent blues record scene in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of labels with colorful names, shadowy origins, lofty goals, and often surprising founders. Dozens of British musicians, critics, and collectors founded labels, licensing (or bootlegging) materials for reissue, importing 45s from the United States and reselling them in Britain, or recording new material for exclusive release. Many of these small concerns, reissuing rarities and recordings by artists outside the commercial mainstream, were labors of love rather than serious commercial enterprises. Their limited-edition discs were marketed directly to their target audience, and label owners rarely did more than break even. Most only issued a handful of recordings, though in the process they revived the stalled careers of US blues singers, provided much-needed income and support to older artists, and introduced Britain to a wider variety of blues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs levels of cinemagoing in Britain over the two decades preceding the first accepted estimates of the national audience, which were produced in 1934. It uses the receipts from the tax on entertainments, levied by British governments starting in 1916, to examine the impact of broader developments, from war to major economic downturns, and radical changes within the industry itself with the introduction of sound technology. A significant discontinuity is identified in the emergence of the talking picture, which worked to broaden and deepen support for the cinema, confirming it as the dominant mass entertainment form of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the exhibition and reception of Kinemacolor in Russia from 1910 to 1916. Kinemacolor was a British method of filming and projecting in natural color invented by George Albert Smith and financed by Charles Urban, a US-born entrepreneur; film historians generally regard it as the most commercially viable color process before the outbreak of war in 1914. The article investigates Urban's interest in Russia as a potential market for Kinemacolor and as a source of interesting filmic material. In addition to identifying the extent of Kinemacolor's exhibition and distribution in Russia between 1910 and 1916, it also examines the Russian subjects filmed by Urban's companies in black and white and color, and identifies two occasions (1909 and 1913) on which Tsar Nikolai II and Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna were filmed in Kinemacolor. The article argues that the reception of Kinemacolor was widespread and diverse, and included members of the Russian imperial family and the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. It references the specialist film-trade press in Britain, Russia, Europe, and North America; theater listings in Britain and Russia; and contemporary reports on Kinemacolor exhibitions in the British and Russian media. The article also draws upon the extensive archive of Urban's private papers, which is currently preserved in Bradford's National Science and Media Museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the history, membership, and rules of the Heath Book Club operating near Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the 1850s in order to gain insight into the lives of readers during the Victorian period. Members included several wealthy landowners, clergymen, and other prominent residents, as well as a few professionals and one tradesman. As members of a book club, readers had access to otherwise hard-to-attain books. As a social network, the book club may have provided additional economic, social, or political returns to the members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, yet these categories occupy only a marginal position in our present theories of genre. The terms of aesthetic judgment tend to fall out when we tally historical genres' discursive conventions and map their formal and thematic contours. In contrast, Victorian literary criticism's dependence on the language of feeling, not only in describing individual works but also in shaping generic taxonomies, provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which the seemingly irreducible particularities of aesthetic experience meet the generalizing force of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses George Henry Lewes's study of living matter in The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60). Despite the physiological materiality of its subject, Lewes's text often discusses states of life that defy clear-cut classification. The process of human aging is a particularly confounding example of life and death's indeterminacy because, as Lewes describes, older age invokes both the physiological and aesthetic intermingling of animal life with stone, petrifaction, and minerality. I argue that Lewes's discussion of aging in Chapter XIII draws directly from the earlier geological research of Charles Lyell and, with brief reference to illustrative examples elsewhere in Victorian writing, I show the ways in which the Lewesian understanding of aging as a state of suspension between animality and minerality is reliant upon and a spur for the nineteenth-century literary imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]