Modern techniques of communication have often and from early on been seen as a major precondition for the rise of nationalism and the invention of nations.1 Although many studies have emphasized the relationship between the media and nationalism, it has hardly been analyzed in a broader historical perspective. Media did indeed often propagate national identities or nationalist views. At the same time, they supported national identities, nationalism, and nationhood by creating networks of distribution, a common language and a common situation of simultaneous reception. Therefore, this chapter discusses the media as part of the discursive invention of nations and as a specific infrastructure for the rise of nationalism. At the same time, we have to consider that some media have supported not only nationalism, but also other identities, such as international, regional, or local identities at certain times.

Chapter 8 provides a select introduction to register, genre, and style. The multidimensional analysis of style reveals a gradual drift from “literate” to “oral” over time. Attention is given here to the news and religious registers. The news register has seen the rise of the newspaper, leading to the introduction of new publication types, such as television, radio, and internet news, and new genres, such as editorials, obituaries, or weather forecasts. The religious register has a long history and has been remarkably stable. Two religious genres, prayers and sermons, have changed little in respect to function, structure, and linguistic characteristics. The function of recipes remains constant (i.e., instructions on how to prepare or do something), thus accounting for the imperative as the defining linguistic form, but we find differences in the content of recipes (medicinal vs. culinary), in the audience of recipes (e.g., the professional vs. the amateur cook), in the structural elements found in recipes (e.g., separation of the ingredients and the procedural steps), and in characteristic linguistic features (e.g., the introduction of null objects and telegraphic style).

This epilogue offers a concluding excursus, and looks back at a few key themes established in the collection of essays in Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity. Its aim is to tease out some further points for discussion concerning what could be described as a Janus-faced tendency within Victorian self-identity – a looking back to the religious and classical past, in the very process of charging forward. This excursus will introduce the conceptual vocabulary of simultaneity and of cultural forgetting, used respectively by Benedict Anderson and Paul Connerton, to facilitate some further reflection on Victorian experiences of time and temporality. It will contend that Victorian cultural engagements with the Bible and antiquity were always mediated via distinctly modern ways of knowing. If the book as a whole details a series of critical engagements with biblical and classical pasts through the long nineteenth century, then in this epilogue, an opportunity arises for analysing the very conditions – the material and epistemological frameworks – which shaped such engagements.

This chapter discusses the Italian critics who wrote about Puccini’s music during his lifetime. Though dilettante writers showered Puccini with praise, more rigorous music critics of his era took a rather more sceptical view of his compositional merits. Puccini’s career coincided with the development of professional music criticism in Italy and also with the rise of musicology as an academic discipline. Significant critics discussed in this chapter include Amintore Galli, Filippo Filippi, Luigi Torchi, and Luigi Alberto Villanis. Particular attention is paid to Fausto Torrefranca, the author of a denunciatory and scathing text called Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale, which blamed Puccini for many of the ills of the modern musical world. Many young critics of the era, such as Torrefranca, Giannotto Bastianelli and Ildebrando Pizzetti, associated Puccini with a backward-looking bourgeoisie and were keen to promote avant-garde Italian music, as well as non-commercial music from the more distant past. Puccini found approval amongst a new generation of pro-Fascist critics during the 1920s. Time and again, Puccini found himself dragged into debates about politics and national identity that went far beyond music.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

This essay introduces Brecht’s oft-neglected interviews. First, it reviews efforts to incorporate these interviews in (or exclude them from) his body of work, before outlining Brecht’s own interest in the form as a both a source of material and a platform for his views. At the center of the article is an examination of Brecht’s interview with Die literarische Welt in 1926. Archival material is used to illuminate the process of construction behind the conversation, which contains Brecht’s first discussion of epic theater. Finally, the article sketches two key influences on the development of his interviews: his embrace of radio as a new medium and his commitment to Marxist media tactics.

The Yezidis (also spelled Yazidi or, in Kurdish, Êzdî) are a Kurmanji (northern Kurdish)-speaking religious minority that are spread across northern Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia) and Western Europe. Today, the largest group of Yezidis live in northern Iraq, which is also home to most of the holy sites. The Yezidis who settled in the Caucasus had left Anatolia during the nineteenth century as well as during the First World War. Since the collapse of the USSR, unemployment and ethnic tensions have pushed many Yezidis from the Caucasus towards Russia, Ukraine or Western Europe. This chapter will set out (i) the Yezidi presence in the USSR with (ii) a focus on their role in the development of Kurdish studies and cultural institutions, as well as (iii) drawing a picture of how the Yezidi presence has evolved after the end of the Soviet Union, especially centring on new identity debates and the relations between the Yezidis and Kurdish movements in the diaspora.

Chapter 2 contrasts these relatively rigid pathways of bureaucratic information-gathering with the novel pathways of communication that the newly founded Economic Society provided. It demonstrates how the Society built up a network of information exchange through correspondence, as well as the publication of a newspaper, the Gazeta de Guatemala. These networks were designed to extend the reach of the Society from urban contexts into rural ones and had an active purpose: members and their associates were exhorted to grow, collect, and harvest economically useful plants. Reports from members over two decades show that, on a small scale at least, this succeeded, leading to an exchange of useful plant material. The varied social position and geographical locations of the newspaper’s subscribers also made its pages an exceptional forum for debate, creating a nascent ‘public sphere’. The networks even extended beyond the Audiencia’s borders, placing Central America in a context of global economic botany and scholarship. One manifestation of the extension of the Society’s practical network was that a member imported a collection of ‘exotic’ plants and seeds from Sumatra and Jamaica, plants which were then grown and harvested in Central America with some success.

Chapter 1 introduces Duras the journalist to English-speaking audiences less familiar with this important aspect of her work as a writer and public persona. I analyze a number of her journalistic writings, in particular, her chroniques judiciaires and rewritings of faits divers in the press in the 1950s and 60s. I examine the way that she engages in public conversations around popular representations of crimes in order to subvert them. Because she is not a trained journalist but a literary writer, she claims to have a deeper insight into crime, criminals, and the judicial process. The writer therefore attempts to correct what she considers erroneous reports already printed in the press – based not on systematic examination of evidence but on close readings of these reports and at times on her presence in the courtroom – with her own interpretations and representations of the crime. According to Duras, dismissing a rationalizing rubric improves the conditions for examining the crime’s specific circumstances and its implications for possibilities of transgression and social critique. This chapter reveals how a keen literary eye can help readers to decipher the news.

This chapter uses a unique collection of hundreds of issues of Golden Dawn (GD) publications and dozens of interviews with the GD leadership and activists to systematically trace its evolution from a street-level gang to the third biggest political party in Greece. The first part of the chapter briefly traces the development of the GD in the 1980s from a small National Socialist ideological movement to a marginal political party. The second part focuses on the ideological, programmatic and, more importantly, the organizational development of the party since the early 1990s. The third section focuses on its local party organizations and their activities, providing a rare overview of internal organizational life.