Advertising Colonial Romance and Imperial Masculinity: The Promotion of Philip Meadows Taylor's Novels in Britain

The comments of Charles Kegan Paul, the Victorian publisher who was involved in publishing the novels of the nineteenth-century British-Indian author Philip Meadows Taylor as single volume reprints in the 1880s, are illuminating. They are indicative of the publisher's position with regard to publishing - that there was often no correlation between commercial success and the artistic merit of a work. According to Kegan Paul, a substandard or mediocre text would be commercially successful as long it met a perceived want on the part of the public. In effect, the ruminations of the publisher suggests that a firm desirous of acquiring commercial success for a work should be an astute judge of the pre-existing wants of consumers within the market. Yet Theodor Adorno, writing in the mid-twentieth century, offers an entirely distinctive perspective to Kegan Paul's observations, arguing that there is nothing foreordained about consumer demand for certain cultural tropes or productions. They in fact are driven by an industry that preempts and conditions the possible reactions of the consumer. Both Kegan Paul's and Adorno's insights are illuminating when it comes to addressing the key issues explored in this essay. Kegan Paul's comments allude to the ways in which the publisher's promotion of Philip Meadows Taylor's fictional depictions of India and its peoples were to a large extent driven in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by their expectations of what metropolitan readers desired at any given time, whereas Adorno's insights reveal the ways in which British-Indian narratives and the public identity of their authors were not assured in advance, but were, to a large extent, engineered by the publishing industry and the literary marketplace.

A realist synthesis of educational interventions to improve nutrition care competencies and delivery by doctors and other healthcare professionals

Objective: To determine what, how, for whom, why, and in what circumstances educational interventions to improve the delivery of nutrition care by doctors and other healthcare professionals work?

Design: Realist synthesis following a published protocol and reported following Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) guidelines. A multidisciplinary team searched Medline, CINAHL, ERIC, EMBASE, PsyINFO, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Science Direct for published and unpublished (grey) literature. The team identified studies with varied designs; appraised their ability to answer the review question; identified relationships between contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes (CMOs); and entered them into a spreadsheet configured for the purpose. The final synthesis identified commonalities across CMO configurations.

Results: Over half of the 46 studies from which we extracted data originated from the US. Interventions that improved the delivery of nutrition care improved skills and attitudes rather than just knowledge; provided opportunities for superiors to model nutrition care; removed barriers to nutrition care in health systems; provided participants with local, practically relevant tools and messages; and incorporated non-traditional, innovative teaching strategies. Operating in contexts where student and qualified healthcare professionals provided nutrition care in both developed and developing countries, these interventions yielded health outcomes by triggering a range of mechanisms, which included: feeling competent; feeling confident and comfortable; having greater self-efficacy; being less inhibited by barriers in healthcare systems; and feeling that nutrition care was accepted and recognised.

Conclusion: These findings show how important it is to move education for nutrition care beyond the simple acquisition of knowledge. They show how educational interventions embedded within systems of healthcare can improve patients’ health by helping health students and professionals to appreciate the importance of delivering nutrition care and feel competent to deliver it.