Imagined Communities in 19th-Century England

During today's discussion, we began with readings from the Victorian Print Media anthology to provide context about social control of the working classes, gender (women), and morality. Ms. Droge led us through a conversation about The Penny Magazine and social control of its readers, i.e., what's missing from The Penny Magazine? We also introduced the idea of "imagined communities" in print culture.

We're going to use today's conversation as a guide to analyzing articles from 19th-century periodicals. This post builds on the skills that you learned with analyzing an advertisement. Instead of focusing on a single advertisement, though, this post asks you to look for a common idea or pattern(s) across several entries in these periodicals. (In other words, you're beginning to work with more materials which means learning to focus your ideas when challenged with an overwhelming amount of detail.)

In preparation for today's class, you were asked to find the following:

• Introduction to Monthly Repository, Nineteenth Century Serials Edition
  • Choose 3 editions of the Monthly Repository to read through (available online) - find something about revolution, something about gender, something about social control of readers, and something about novels.
• Introduction to The English Woman's Journal, Nineteenth Century Serials Edition
  • Choose 3 editions of The English Woman's Journal to read through (available online) - find something about social conditions abroad, something about women's social condition in England, and a poem or two.

Below are a series of questions to help you describe, analyze, and interpret the archival materials. You may answer either in 1) bulletted, complete sentences or 2) create paragraphs that are organized in the following order:

1. Choose either The English Woman's Journal or Monthly Repository.
2. Write a 150-250 word synopsis of the introduction provided by the editors of the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition. Be sure to mention the editors/authors of the introduction in the first sentence of your synopsis. The synopsis should include historical and contextual information as well as anything else that you find interesting (or will be important to the rest of your post).
3. Because you will be working with multiple articles or literature, you'll need to have sub-bullets on this point:
   • Create full bibliographical entries for each article or piece of literature. (You should have 4 entries -- remember that you were to search across 3 editions of your periodical so each entry will be slightly different with page numbers, date, author, etc. The point of a full bibliographic entry, including the digital project that houses the periodical, is to ensure that you can find the archival artifact again. Check the MLA 8th edition Links to an external site. to make sure you have everything in your entry, including a link to the actual artifact (and the actual page, if you can!).
   • Under each bibliographic entry, provide a very brief description of the type of writing (review of literary book, news article, advertisement, historical entry, travel journal, poem, etc.). Using as your guide the questions we relied upon for assessing the advertisement, provide a synthesis of the article or literature; include a sentence identifying what topic (see below) this article fulfills:
     • If you chose the Monthly Repository - find something about revolution, something about gender, something about social control of readers, and something about novels
     • If you chose The English Woman's Journal - find something about social conditions abroad, something about women's social condition in England, and a poem or two.
4. Include references and a brief discussion of 2 of the below readings from today. Choose your 2 readings based on any relationship the readings may have to your chosen articles from the periodical:
   
   • "The Literature of the Working Classes" (VPM 40)
   • "What Girls Read" (VPM 68)
   • "Prosecution for Publishing an Alleged Obscene Book" (VPM 105)
5. Provide a 150-250 word synopsis of Benedict Anderson's concept "imagined communities." Use brief quotes from the excerpt from Imagined Communities
   (pdf). 
6. Finally, it's now time to relate all of this information to an analysis in 300-500 words. (You may, of course, write more than the max of 500 words, but be aware of the quality of your writing.) The below questions will help you start; avoid answering each question in lock-step. Instead, explore the ideas and connections, especially in regards to "imagined communities" and social control. Across the 3 editions of the periodical in these selected topics:
   • did you find any relationships about social control? What are they? How do they manifest across the publication?
   • Is there some relationship or pattern that has become apparent?
   • How does "imagined communities" impact these patterns? or not? What are the limitations of "imagined communities" based on your articles from the periodical?
   • How do the 2 class readings interact with your findings? (Use brief quotes from the readings here.)
7. Avoid doing any other research outside the class readings and the digital surrogates of the periodicals. I'm asking you to analyze based on theoretical writings, historical context, and archival materials. That's a lot of material! If you have interests that go outside this post, make a list of all of those questions at the conclusion of this post. You might come back to those queries at a later post or project.

Reminder: the late submission policy -- no points for discussion post late submissions. Each post is worth 10 points; see our grading rubric for these posts.

See also the Writing Tips to help with formal voice in these posts.