Through the lens of the hospital magazine - Downshire and Holywell psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s

An exploration of the pages of two psychiatric hospital magazines, Speedwell from Holywell Hospital, Antrim, and The Sketch from Downshire Hospital, Downpatrick, reveals the activity filled lives of patients and staff during the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of great change in mental health care. It was also a time of political turbulence in Northern Ireland. With large in-patient populations, both hospitals had a range of occupational and sporting activities available to patients and staff. The magazines formed part of the effort to promote the ethos of a therapeutic community. While hospital magazines may be viewed as one aspect of an institutional system that allowed people to cut themselves from the wider society, they also provided opportunities for budding writers to express their views on life in a hospital from the service user perspective. As such they offer some valuable insights into the lives of psychiatric patients.

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine:'An Unprecedented Phenomenon'

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine is inspired by the ongoing critical fascination with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the burgeoning recognition of its centrality to the Romantic age. Though the magazine itself was published continuously for well over a century and a half, this volume concentrates specifically on those years when William Blackwood was at the helm, beginning with his founding of the magazine in 1817 and closing with his death in 1834. These were the years when, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in 1832, Blackwood's reigned as 'an unprecedented Phenomenon in the world of letters.' The magazine placed itself at the centre of the emerging mass media, commented decisively on all the major political and cultural issues that shaped the Romantic movement, and published some of the leading writers of the day, including Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Galt, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.

'This much-needed volume reminds us not only why Blackwood's was the most influential periodical publication of the time, but also how its writers, writings, and critical agendas continue to shape so many of the scholarly concerns of Romantic studies in the twenty-first century.' - Charles Mahoney, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, USA

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
'A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own': A Passage to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; R.Morrison & D.S.Roberts
PART I: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS
Beginning Blackwood's: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile; P.Flynn
John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood's: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press; T.Richardson
From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood's and the London Magazine; D.Higgins
Camaraderie and Conflict: De Quincey and Wilson on Enemy Lines; R.Morrison
Selling Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1834; D.Finkelstein
PART II: BLACKWOOD'S CULTURE AND CRITICISM
Blackwood's 'Personalities'; T.Mole
Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the 'Blackwood's School' of Criticism; N.Mason
Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity; D.Stewart
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the Scientific Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh; W.Christie
The Art and Science of Politics in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, c. 1817-1841; D.Kelly
Prosing Poetry: Blackwood's and Generic Transposition, 1820-1840; J.Camlot
PART III: BLACKWOOD'S FICTIONS
Blackwood's and the Boundaries of the Short Story; T.Killick
The Edinburgh of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg's Fiction; G.Hughes
'The Taste for Violence in Blackwood's Magazine'; M.Schoenfield
PART IV: BLACKWOOD'S AT HOME
John Wilson and Regency Authorship; R.Cronin
John Wilson and Sport; J.Strachan
William Maginn and the Blackwood's 'Preface' of 1826; D.E.Latané, Jr.
All Work and All Play: Felicia Hemans's Edinburgh Noctes; N.Sweet
PART V: BLACKWOOD'S ABROAD
Imagining India in Early Blackwood's; D.S.Roberts
Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood's, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad; A.Jarrells
Selected Bibliography
Index

ROBERT MORRISON is Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His book, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. He has edited writings by Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and John Polidori.
DANIEL SANJIV ROBERTS is Reader in English at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His publications include a monograph, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (2000), and major critical editions of Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches and Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama; the latter was cited as a Distinguished Scholarly Edition by the MLA. He is currently working on an edition of Charles Johnstone's novel The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis for the Early Irish Fiction series.

The rise and demise of a book-review magazine interpreting the cultural work of Books in Canada (1971-2008)

This interdisciplinary study examines the contribution that a book-review magazine makes to the cultural identity of its readers. It is the result of reflections on the cultural work of Books in Canada , on whether or not this periodical was a cultural worksite and if that is the case how it performed that cultural work. In addition, it interrogates factors that may have contributed to the magazine's demise. The study affirms that Books in Canada, a cultural enterprise from 1971 to 2008, mirrored and helped to shape book and literary culture in Canada through its circulation, through the personalities of its editors, through its front covers and through its reviewers and their reviews. Furthermore, it proposes that the demise of the enterprise was due to a combination of factors. The study begins with an introduction to book reviewing and special-interest magazines. Chapter I examines the interplay between selected visual and textual contents published in Books in Canada in its founding years. These components reflected and helped to fuel the cultural nationalism that was sweeping Canada subsequent to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal. There were also persistent rumours and comments about the magazine that caused certain"cracks in the foundation" to appear. Chapter II compares the aims and editorial challenges of Val Clery, founder of Books in Canada , with those of Adrien Thério, founder of Lettres québécoises, and of the editors of the magazines' twentieth-anniversary issues, Paul Stuewe in the case of the former and André Vanasse in the case of the latter. Evidence in the content of the magazine, editorial and otherwise, indicated that the"contracts" that the editors made with their readers over the years were similar, to reflect and shape a cultural identity, but the result of their"projects," that is, the nature of those identities, was distinctly different. Evidently then, personal aims, preferences and political leanings of editors can have a major impact on the content of a book-review magazine and thus on the cultural work that it does. Therefore, in Chapter III, I focus on selected contents published during the tenures of two of Books in Canada 's key editors, Paul Stuewe and Olga Stein, in order to understand ways that their choices constituted a form of cultural work. The second part of this chapter moves from an analysis of the cultural work of editors to an examination of the cultural work of reviewers. Here, through a close-reading of a selection of reviews published in Books in Canada, and in other periodicals, I argue that reviewers do cultural work in the way that they negotiate their presence in a review, and in how they signal that presence through lexical choices and through the degree of intellectual interaction that they invite. Intellectual interaction is at the core of Chapter IV.This chapter consists of close readings of some of the"billboards" of the enterprise, that is, the front covers of Books in Canada , in order to show how these important components do cultural work by requiring readers to make an intellectual leap from image to text. Chapter V suggests that book reviews, the company's"bills of goods," do cultural work in much the same way as the paratexts of a book. One of my own reviews is offered as a case-study along with a number of other reviews of how central components of a book-review magazine do cultural work through the illocutionary force of their sentences. The first part of Chapter VI, the final chapter, measures the legacy of the magazine, in particular, the annual Books in Canada First Novel Award. Created in 1976, this prize is awarded to the author of the novel judged by a Books in Canada prize committee to be the best first novel in English of the year. The second part of Chapter VI sheds light on factors that may have contributed to the closure of the enterprise, including the copyright uproar that accompanied the agreement that Adrian Stein, publisher of Books in Canada and Olga Stein's husband, made in 2001 with the online book merchant, Amazon.com. Furthermore, this penultimate section of the study suggests that one of the most important factors in the magazine's demise was the decision by the Steins to exploit their position as owners, publisher, and editor of a book-review periodical, a government-subsidized one at that, to publish their own lengthy pre-trial defense of Conrad Black. The chapter then zooms back from the particular to the general with a broader consideration of the impact of technology and globalization on the book industry and on the ability of Books in Canada to survive in any form, print or digital.

Launch plan for a new magazine for Pangea Lda. Company

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Mental health and neuroscience. A perspective from the magazine market

Mental health awareness has been rising worldwide, motivated by its social and economic costs. Despite the investment in research in neuroscience in the recent years, little is known about the underlying mechanisms in the brain that are correlated with psychiatric conditions. This project, through two feature articles suitable to be published in magazines, provides perspectives onto mental health research. First it presents an example where psychiatry joins forces with neuroscience and computer science in an interdisciplinary effort to improve the life of those affected by mental disorders. The second article gathers opinions which claim that mental health research priorities should be set by patients themselves, or even that people with lived experience of mental health issues should have an active role in that research. This project was planned and researched while I was an Erasmus student at Nottingham Trent University, in the United Kingdom.

The White Cane Magazine, Fall 2013, Vol. 4, no. 3

Quarterly newsletter produced by the Iowa Department of Blind, about the information and activities that are on going in the department.