Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature最新文献

Polling for Peace 为和平投票

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-09 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0003

M. Faragher

{"title":"Polling for Peace","authors":"M. Faragher","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on British public response to Italy’s incursion into Abyssinia in 1935, journalist F.W. Deedes argued that the 1934 Peace Ballot, a widespread national referendum evincing public support for the League of Nations, had successfully turned public opinion against interventionism. Completed by over eleven million people, the Peace Ballot was the most influential public opinion survey of the 1930s. It was also a press sensation, drawing praise by League advocates and disdain from conservative papers, which referred to it as a “Ballot of Blood.” This chapter traces both optimism and skepticism over polling when it first entered public discourse via the newspapers. While Waugh’s Scoop (1938) details the hapless efforts of the aesthete and nature-writer William Boot to provide honest reporting of the Abyssinian Crisis, the overwhelming powers of press magnates and their financial interests undermine his work by manipulating and capitalizing on public opinion. Waugh’s skeptical vision of public opinion in Scoop mirrored his public critiques of the research organization Mass-Observation, whose practices of public observation he likened to the actions of “keyhole-observers and envelope-steamers,” and whose methods, he argued, would empower authoritarians seeking to control public opinion. Mirroring similar themes of Storm Jameson’s novel None Turn Back (1936), Scoop not only critiques the newspaper trade, but also denounces institutionalized public opinion and its imbrication in the newspaper industry in the 1930s. Like other skeptics, Waugh challenges the utopian notion that polling fosters unmediated exposure to public thought; the mediation of polling through the political morass of newspapers elicited fears that polling would become just one more media cudgel with which to shape and manipulate public sentiment.","PeriodicalId":267398,"journal":{"name":"Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114727698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

What the Listeners Want 听众想要什么

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-09 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0004

M. Faragher

{"title":"What the Listeners Want","authors":"M. Faragher","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"In 1942, Val Gielgud and John Dickson Carr wrote and produced a pair of plays: Inspector Silence Takes the Air and Thirteen to the Gallows. Both are set in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) studios during wartime, and both dramatized dead air and dead bodies. Gielgud, as a high-level radio-producer, feared that the BBC was broadcasting into a void. The emergence of the Listener Research Department, a unit designed to assess listener sentiment about BBC programming, promised to usher in an institution with a more responsive relationship to its audience. But these plays, featuring BBC technicians as villains, criticize the BBC’s Reithian self-conception as an unliteral force to produce and manufacture public taste, a tendency in constant tension with the burgeoning science of listener research. This chapter traces the ambivalent responses to the wireless as both a method of controlling public opinion and a medium with the potential to facilitate psychographic congruity across populations. Those outside the BBC expressed equal parts concern and optimism about the ability of wireless technology to shape its audiences. Recognizing the BBC’s power to move listeners, Olaf Stapledon’s short story “A World of Sound” is the first of his works to theorize the sonic sphere as a means of transcending individual consciousness; radio-centric telepathy would later become a crux to his aesthetic project, with novels like Star Marker imagining radio waves as a means of decentralizing authority and enabling individuals to access the public consciousness directly and make collective decisions.","PeriodicalId":267398,"journal":{"name":"Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121075710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Afterword 后记

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-09 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0007

M. Faragher

引用次数: 0

A Science So-Called 所谓的科学

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-09 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0002

M. Faragher

{"title":"A Science So-Called","authors":"M. Faragher","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"H.G. Wells’s life extends the radical evolution of psychographics outlined in the Introduction, but his oeuvre also proves the inherent difficulty in aestheticizing the emergent age of social psychology—a point evinced when producer Alexander Korda demanded Wells revise the script version of his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come three times to make it “filmable.” While Wells’s novel imagines a peaceable future wherein social psychology becomes the “whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world,” the film adaptation instead symbolizes this philosophical transformation by starring a sole philosopher-king who, against the people’s will, seeks to control and colonize the universe. This chapter argues that the conflict between these two Wellsian visions is prefigured by his intimate and conflicted relationship to sociology and group psychology. As early as 1906, Wells sought out the position as the first British chair of sociology at the University of London. But Wells was immediately to become a gadfly in academia: he engaged in scathing critiques of sociology for denying its utopian impulses and refuted theories of group dynamics put forward by Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter. Incorporating readings across Wells’s literary career—including Anticipations, An Englishman Looks at the World, and In the Days of the Comet—this chapter contends that Wells’s writing captures a life-long effort to reprise the scope of sociology from outside academia, and captures the writer’s foundering efforts to aestheticize the institutional promise of social psychology—efforts that inevitably succumb to Wells’s fetishization of pseudo-authoritarian technocracy.","PeriodicalId":267398,"journal":{"name":"Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125896472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Morass of Morale 士气的泥潭

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-09 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0006

M. Faragher

{"title":"The Morass of Morale","authors":"M. Faragher","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The Ministry of Information (MoI) had a robust morale-research apparatus which, more often than not, failed to successfully appeal to the public in high-profile information campaigns. Cecil Day-Lewis, who worked in the Publications division of the MoI during the war, allegorized such failures through his detective fiction; in both Malice in Wonderland and Minute for Murder, he alludes to Ministry campaigns like the “Silent Column Campaign,” which failed to appropriately respond to public criticism elicited from Home Intelligence morale reports. Day-Lewis’s subtle critiques of MoI morale assessment are also mirrored in the wartime work of Elizabeth Bowen, who used her information work in Ireland to encourage the MoI to take on more sympathetic public stances towards the neutral nation during the war. While Bowen attempted to read and translate the desires of the Irish public to English officials, The Heat of the Day likewise emphasizes characters’ struggles in interpreting and mastering the desires of others. In both The Heat of the Day and in her wartime short stories, Bowen returns to early psychographic symbols of ghosts and apparitions to elucidate the precarious position of the public opinion worker during wartime. In this chapter, both Bowen and Day-Lewis remind readers that the desire to manifest interiority as material produces fear and anxiety amongst citizens who feel themselves spied upon and who see psychographics as just another means of control for governments and institutions against its citizens.","PeriodicalId":267398,"journal":{"name":"Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature","volume":"120 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122971587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Gender of Public Opinion 舆论的性别

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-09 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0005

M. Faragher

{"title":"The Gender of Public Opinion","authors":"M. Faragher","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.","PeriodicalId":267398,"journal":{"name":"Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116610022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 2