By the end of the nineteenth century, evolution through natural selection had been widely accepted, but the means by which innate or acquired characteristics were transmitted from parent to offspring remained hotly contested. As the literary career of Vernon Lee makes evident, discussion of the validity of newly espoused theories was not limited to science. This essay explores Lee's lifelong engagement with emerging and often unproven ideas in heredity and evolutionary science by arguing, first, that rather than a unidirectional flow of ideas from experimental science to literature and the social sciences, there was instead a productive and creative trafficking between these fields; and, second, that despite Lee's early rejection of Lamarckism, she continued to utilize superseded paradigms to inform her writing in a number of fields outside evolutionary biology.
In the space of a few weeks in 2020, the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus into a global pandemic has changed the way we work, live, interact and communicate with one another. One highly unexpected result of the massive rise in homeworking has been an extraordinary exposure of domestic bookshelves, which in the famous words of Amanda Hess, have become the “quarantine’s hottest accessory” (New York Times, May 1, 2020). Personal bookshelves had hitherto been jealously guarded, a marker for personal taste and shared only with the select few invited into their owners’ households and allowed to scan the titles on display. This physically delimited space has now been unleashed upon the world: where once few people could look at the books on our shelves, now theoretically, almost everyone can. The pandemic bookshelf has accidently been fashioned into the most ubiquitous liminal zone anywhere: it is the ostensibly private and personal backdrop for the staging of our public, digitally mediated, professional existence. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives from anthropology, psychology and literary theory, this chapter explores the many ways in which the private-public bookshelf has become the cultural liminal space par excellence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
No abstract
The concept of copyright, like the prose novel in codex form, was unknown in the era of manuscripts; both were directly shaped by the introduction of movable type (see typography ). The concept of libel, on the other hand, long predates printing, with Sumerian, Greek, and Roman law all recognizing it as a punishable offence. The author‐privilege system (first granted in a range of European city‐states, starting with Venice, from 1469) and the French book‐privilege system (1498–1526) are examples of legal protection at the behest of the state or of printers to maintain a commercial monopoly and political censorship , predating the institution of formal copyright, and emerging within the first decades of printing (Rose, 10; Armstrong, 2–3). Initially, copyright was mediated through a printers’ guild operating with the approval of the state; in England this monopoly was held with the Stationers’ Company from 1557, when Queen Mary issued a Royal Charter aimed specifically at suppressing heretical and seditious material (copyright evolved in the light of both censorship and libel). The Stationers’ Company continued to hold this monopoly (as a trade protection) until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1640. This was replaced by the Licensing Act (1662–95), which required the registration of all works before publication in order to receive legal protection; the Act was specifically aimed at suppressing libel, i.e., the printing of “seditious, treasonable and unlicensed books and pamphlets,” and to facilitate the state's political, moral, and economic control over print ( http://www.copyrighthistory.org : record, U.K._1622). In 1695, the Licensing Act expired after repeated attempts to renew it failed, and the legal protection of books (and with it, official state censorship) was effectively at an end. From 1695 until the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne—the world's first copyright act—printing in England was effectively unregulated (see publishing ).
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