"What is the meaning of all this gluttony?": Edgeworth, The Victorians, C. S. Lewis and a Taste for Fantasy

See articl

Uncanny Visitors: The Child Ghost in “haunted” Children’s Literature

I begin with two related propositions that suggest a perhaps quirky way of understanding the contours of western children’s literature: first, that an unquiet ghost waits at the heart of children’s literature; and second, that children’s literature’s “primal scene” is the haunting. As a means to argue my point that children’s literature is “haunted” fiction, I will test my hypotheses by way of a few representative texts: a pair of well-known post-war British children’s ghost stories and three..

Stories For Children, Histories of Childhood. Volume II

The place of the child and childhood in our culture and his/her legal status is a subject which touches a sensitive nerve and triggers passionate responses just as much at the start of the 21st century as it did two hundred years ago. Curious then to note that the academic study of childhood had long been neglected by social historians while its literature, with a few notable exceptions, had too often been relegated to a minor category when not simply dismissed as "pulp fiction". Over the last two decades or so pioneering research has begun to redress this balance and paved the way towards a reappraisal of the child and childhood as a valid field of study. At the same time, by highlighting the areas which still require exploration, it has underlined the distance we still have to cover in order to achieve a balanced integration of both the child and childhood into the social and cultural "story" of our past. It is hoped that the papers published here will, in their own modest way, contribute to this ongoing process of replacing the child inside a culture which proudly claims to have created the golden age of childhood

International Comparison of Enumeration-Based Quantification of DNA Copy-Concentration Using Flow Cytometric Counting and Digital Polymerase Chain Reaction

Enumeration-based determination of DNA copy-concentration was assessed through an international comparison among national metrology institutes (NMIs) and designated institutes (DIs). Enumeration-based quantification does not require a calibration standard thereby providing a route to “absolute quantification”, which offers the potential for reliable value assignments of DNA reference materials, and International System of Units (SI) traceability to copy number 1 through accurate counting. In this study, 2 enumeration-based methods, flow cytometric (FCM) counting and the digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR), were compared to quantify a solution of the pBR322 plasmid at a concentration of several thousand copies per microliter. In addition, 2 orthogonal chemical-analysis methods based on nucleotide quantification, isotope-dilution mass spectrometry (IDMS) and capillary electrophoresis (CE) were applied to quantify a more concentrated solution of the plasmid. Although 9 dPCR results from 8 laboratories showed some dispersion (relative standard deviation [RSD] = 11.8%), their means were closely aligned with those of the FCM-based counting method and the orthogonal chemical-analysis methods, corrected for gravimetric dilution factors. Using the means of dPCR results, the RSD of all 4 methods was 1.8%, which strongly supported the validity of the recent enumeration approaches. Despite a good overall agreement, the individual dPCR results were not sufficiently covered by the reported measurement uncertainties. These findings suggest that some laboratories may not have considered all factors contributing to the measurement uncertainty of dPCR, and further investigation of this possibility is warranted