This study aims to situate Francis Sandford's works in the context of English book history. In particular, I seek to discover the unusualness embodied in these books, with special attention to A Genealogical History of the Kings of England, and Monarchs of Great Britain (1677). Sandford established trusting relationships with his kings, and the books he published during his service as a herald were for and about the royal family. Although this study is mainly concerned with the Genealogical History, the backgrounds and circumstances of the other works need to be discussed as well, given the lack of sufficient studies. In particular, the integration of text and illustration is an area of great interest in Sandford's books. Therefore, this study also examines the print culture of seventeenth-century England, as well as the engravers and etchers of that time.

Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge is regarded as one of his few historical novels, as it deals with the Gordon Riots in 1780. Many critics have analyzed Barnaby Rudge by using two words, ‘public’ and ‘private,’ as key concepts. The point is that although he chooses historical and hence ‘public’ events, namely, the Gordon Riots, as a main plot of the novel, Dickens’s intention is, basically, to write about ‘private’ lives of its main characters. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this point by focusing on the duel between Geoffrey Haredale and John Chester which is depicted at the end of the novel. Before the duel takes place, Haredale and Chester encounter and have a quarrel with one another several times, which becomes more and more violent after each encounter and which leads up to the duel in the end. By closely examining these scenes in which they face each other one by one, I argue that this conflict between Haredale and Chester also has both ‘private’ and ‘public’ aspects, that the duel has a meaning of a punishment on Chester, and that it is quite appropriate that this duel concludes the novel which portrays ‘private’ lives of its main characters.

“The Signalman”, a short story by Charles Dickens can be distinguished from other ghost stories. What makes this short story special is its focus on railways and the telegraph. This is a complex ‘network’ where ghosts appear in the story and to which the work itself belongs, for “The Signalman” was published as a part of Mugby Junction.

Employing media theory analysis, this paper re-reads “The Signalman” as a novel that echoes a Britain of the nineteenth century where new networks of railways and electrical wires enabled the rapid transit and mass communication. The new and revolutionary flow of information was mysterious and beyond the understanding of ordinary people. It was almost something spiritual. Dickens represented this enigma in “The Signalman” as the junction of ghosts and the latest media. The author's consciousness towards this junction can be found in the other chapters he wrote for Mugby Junction. Through this book, the protagonist improves his understanding of this junction. Our focus on technological media and spiritualistic mediums would give nineteenth century ghosts a certain definition: a piece to fill an unexplainable space in a complex of lines of information. Networks offer ghosts a place to appear, and people recognize a network through ghostly images.

John Russell Brown made a suggestive assumption that Webster fashioned The Duchess of Malfi with Blackfriars playhouse in mind, on the ground that dramatic effects of light and darkness are fully exploited in the play. Blindness in the pitch-dark, sometimes thoroughly obstructing eyesight of characters, is also symbolic of fatal lack of human sensibility and perceptiveness. Ferdinand with his incestuous fixation on his sister grows furious at her secret remarriage. Full light of recognition of his own perverseness is unendurable, so he imprisons her into darkness, torments and kills her without casting a momentary glance at her. Constantly turning away from his irretrievable folly until the last moment of his life, he dies, as it were, in psychic blindness. His agent of evil, Bosola who eagerly pursued advancement at court, falling into a perilous predicament with slight hope for survival, finds what he thought he saw was nothing but an illusory image. Realization of his own inner blindness, however, does not lead him to a penetrating insight into himself nor the world that surrounds him. All he can discern is boundless and thick mist shrouding the play's world, far more horrifying than the artificial darkness Ferdinand makes.

There is little intimation of illuminative hope perceivable beyond the darkness in the play. And for the audience full light of recognition of the play's world was unattainable until they stepped out of the dim playhouse and found themselves to be exposed to the light outside.

This study investigated how two types of reading activity―silent reading and oral reading―facilitate English language learners' listening comprehension. 83 university students were assigned to the silent reading group (n=37) and the oral reading group (n=46). Each group was also divided into higher and lower groups according to the level of their listening comprehension. The pre-and post-test were conducted before and after the 10-week training session for each group.

The results of a t test indicated that the silent reading group had significantly higher listening comprehension, while no significant differences were found in the score of the oral reading group.

A possible explanation for the better performance of the silent reading group over the oral group is that reading silently not only helped reduce the cognitive load of the students but facilitated the sentence comprehension, whereas the oral reading group paid more attention to reading the words rather than comprehending the actual content. The results also suggest that the silent reading group may have adopted top-down processing where they were given the opportunity to comprehend the sentences at their own pace.