Folk like us: emotional movement from the screen and the platform in british life model lantern slide sets 1880-1910

The turn of the Nineteenth Century was the golden age of the magic lantern, at least in terms of its popularity across the UK, as in much of Europe and the United States. This article argues that one of the chief reasons for its success in this period was that often it both represented and was presented by individuals similar to those in many of its audiences. Focusing on life model lantern slide series/sets, which were also at their most popular during this period, the article draws on two large datasets in order to consider aspects of screen practice associated with the slides themselves and with their conditions of performance. The article argues that slides and shows were designed to foster recognition and projection in their audiences, allowing them to compare the moral lessons conveyed by many life model sets with their own everyday experiences. The article thus seeks to explain the persuasiveness of many life model slide sets, showing that a form of entertainment which sometimes appears melodramatic or naïve to modern viewers, was in fact skilfully designed to fulfil such important objectives for countless local presenters and their audiences.La edad de oro de la linterna mágica, sobre todo en términos de popularidad, se desarrolló durante las primeras décadas del siglo XIX, tanto en el Reino Unido como en gran parte de Europa y Estados Unidos. Este artículo mantiene que una de las principales razones de su éxito en este período fue que a menudo las funciones de linterna mágica se representaban y eran presentadas por individuos similares a los que se encontraban entre el público de sus espectáculos. Centrándose en los conjuntos de series de placas para linterna mágica denominadas ‘Life Model’, que también alcanzaron su máximo esplendor en esta época, el artículo se fundamenta en dos grandes bases de datos con el objetivo de examinar los aspectos prácticos del uso de las placas en la pantalla y sus condiciones de representación. El artículo analiza cómo las placas y los espectáculos fueron diseñados para fomentar el reconocimiento y la proyección en sus audiencias, permitiéndoles comparar las lecciones morales transmitidas por muchos de los conjuntos de placas ‘Life Model’ con sus propias experiencias cotidianas. También pretende explicar la capacidad de persuasión de muchas de estas colecciones de placas mostrándolas como una forma de entretenimiento, que a veces parece melodramática o ingenua para los espectadores modernos, y que fueron hábilmente diseñadas por incontables linternistas locales para cumplir importantes fines entre sus audiencias

Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917-27

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.The return of facially disfigured men from the trenches of World War One occasioned a muted public reaction in the US. However, this article will show that burgeoning discourses concerning plastic surgery in the US also generated a significant reaction in the popular press, and that these were reflected, too, in several feature films dealing with facial surgery on disfigured veterans. Though several of these films depicted miraculous transformations occasioned by the surgeons, Robert Florey’s 1927 film, Face Value, focused on an American veteran with facial scarring that could not be repaired. The article will argue that this film drew strongly upon the increasingly prominent public presence of the gueules cassées in the US during 1926 and 1927. Depicting gueules cassées and their facial injuries prominently in several scenes, the film brought to attention difficult questions concerning the futures of such men, which the US media had hitherto rarely addressed

Transcriptomic signatures across human tissues identify functional rare genetic variation

© 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION: The human genome contains tens of thousands of rare (minor allele frequency 800 genomes matched with transcriptomes across 49 tissues, we were able to study RVs that underlie extreme changes in the transcriptome. To capture the diversity of these extreme changes, we developed and integrated approaches to identify expression, allele-specific expression, and alternative splicing outliers, and characterized the RV landscape underlying each outlier signal. We demonstrate that personal genome interpretation and RV discovery is enhanced by using these signals. This approach provides a new means to integrate a richer set of functional RVs into models of genetic burden, improve disease gene identification, and enable the delivery of precision genomics

Freaks in late nineteenth-century British media and medicine

This thesis explores the prevalence of freaks in late nineteenth-century British culture through popular and medical print media. Through their consistent representation and exhibition, freaks became a part of mainstream culture. Due to their regular reproduction, freak narratives and images often perpetuated the lives of freaks long after their deaths; thereby creating freak legacies. This thesis employs the theoretical concept of generativity, drawn from John Kotre’s work, to investigate the role of freaks and freak legacies in late nineteenth-century culture. Generativity is the process which allows the continuation of lives after death, through the creation and perpetuation of legacy. Through their regular representation and reproduction in print, I argue, freaks were generative in that they contributed to the perpetuation of their own and others’ legacies in late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, the generativity of freak narratives for medical and popular press readerships is considered to demonstrate the multiple ways freak representations were constructed to suit broad and diverse audiences. The first two chapters of this thesis examine popular representations of freaks and the last two look at medicine’s interaction with freak bodies. The first half of this thesis establishes the mainstream status of freaks by exploring their numerous representations in a diverse range of popular print sources. The first chapter demonstrates some of the ways popular media engaged with freaks and their legacies. In the second chapter, the popular appeal of freaks is further explored through a case study of the two UK visits of the Barnum and Bailey circus at the end of the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the generative use of freaks in building the famous showman Phineas T. Barnum’s legacy. Then, the next half of this thesis turns to medical culture to explore the professional engagement with anomalous bodies. Chapter three explores the intricacies of the medicine –freak relationship by demonstrating medicine’s attempts to assert authority over freakish bodies. The final chapter examines the importance of legacy to the medical profession and offers an analysis of three freak case studies which demonstrate this aim. These case studies also make up a chapter in Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840-1910, which is due to be published by Pickering and Chatto in 2012.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo