Journal articles on the topic 'Poets, American – 19th century – Biography'

Typically, the origin story of Existentialism has depicted Latin America’s contributions as subsequent and tributary to its European counterpart. Nevertheless, a select few critics have approached this history in Hispanic America from a chronologically inclusive perspective, by calling attention to an Existential Poetics in modernismo. This article expands the borders of Existential Poetics to fashion a Latin American literary imaginary. Given the work already done on Rubén Darío and José Martí, both of whom have been studied independently, my analysis will be collective, favoring philopoetic works by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Julián del Casal, José Asunción Silva, and João Cruz e Sousa. The purpose of examining Hispanic-American poets in conjunction with a Brazilian is to accentuate the Pan-American quality of this Existentialism avant la lettre. As I will discuss, all these poems deal with a crisis of irrelevance and overtly question being in the world, classic motifs of Existentialism. Together, these poems allow for the synchronized inclusion of Latin American voices to the universal history of Existentialism, an approached not explicitly carried out by most philosophical and literary historiographers.

The author of the article demonstrates the ways of functioning of the biography, intellectual thought and work of Ignacy Krasicki in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. References to the literary, ideological and biographical heritage of the poet by positivists and modernists reveal Krasicki’s importance to cul�ture and literature during the second half of the 19th century. The basic goal is to extract from different texts (poet’s biographies, portraits, profiles, studies, synthetic approaches as well as literature - poetry, novels, drama) written by writers, critics and historians of Polish literature, positivism and modernism of modes of references to the shape and heritage of the prince’s poets. The return of positivists and modernists to Krasicki means the possibility of diagnosing one’s own present, and also facilitates defining the identity of culture with its limitations and deficits

The present paper represents an attempt to focus upon analyzing and describing the major features of Arab American poetry written by prominent Arab poets who had arrived in America on behalf of millions of immigrants during the 19th century. Some of who wrote in English and Arabic like Ameen Rihani (1876-1940); Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) and Mikhail Naimy (1889-1988). Others wrote in Arabic like Elia Abumadi (1890-1957). Most of their poems in Mahjar (place of emigration) reveal nostalgia, their love to their countries and their ancestors and issues relating to Arab countries. The paper analyzes some of their poems based on linguistic, grammatical, lexical and rhetorical levels.

The poetry of the world-renowned poetess Emily Dickenson received general acclaim in the fifties of the previous century, 70 years after her death. This country-dwelling lady who had locked herself from the surrounding world, created one of the most precious examples of the 19th century American poetry and became one of the most celebrated poets of all time without leaving her own garden.Her soul was her universe and the mission of Dickenson’s sole was to open the universe to let the people see it. Interestingly, most of her poems lack a title, are short and symbolic. The poetess managed to disclose the dark side of the human brain which symbolizes death and eternity.

Imagism was a movement in early 20th century Anglo-American poetry that favoured precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Imagists stressed on the direct treatment of the subject matter and strictly adhered to the rule that even a single word was not used unnecessarily. Imagists used the exact word instead of decorative words and rejected most 19th century poetry as cloudy verbosity. Imagist poets were influenced by Japanese Haiku, poems of 17 syllables which usually present only two juxtaposed images. Ezra Pound has made a conscious study of the Japanese Haiku. According to Pound, Japanese make a wonderful use of Haiku where they usually use a single image. A haiku is a haiku because all the images it conveys occur simultaneously in a person's present perceptions of the world. Ezra Pound is one the major exponents of imagist school who gave systematic theory of modernism. Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro is regarded as a fine specimen of Haiku. Pound recalls that once he stepped out of a "metro", train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman. Throughout the day, Pound attempted to find words as worthy and as lovely as that sudden emotion. To his mind came an equation which was not in speech but in little sploches of colour. This feeling was the beginning of a language in colourfor Pound. Pound further elaborates that to express this kind of emotion he might find a new school of painting that would speak only by arrangements in colours. To substantiate his arguments, Pound expounds his view in Vorticism.

American exceptionalism, Joyce Appleby has recently reminded us, is “America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism.” Now that the multicultural history of the United States is finally being written, nothing would justify another look at American exceptionalism, except perhaps the need to examine the intellectual ways that have hidden American historical and social diversity for so long. In this essay I basically argue that a certain appropriation of the 18th-Century conception of nature as “what is” played a role also in the development of American exceptionalism. The naturalist rhetoric in American discourse in the 19th Century, I further argue, ran parallel to the most savage depredations of nature ever performed by humankind. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the discrepancy between the steady construction of that greatest of modern artifacts, the American nation, and its concomitant self-justification as a thing of nature. The other side of the commodification of America is its naturalization, an idea that I find is supported, whether critically or uncritically, by many American poets and artists. In recent times we have witnessed a number of ecological attempts at the social recovery of nature in the most advanced capitalist countries, including, of course, the United States. I am not concerned here with these developments, of which ecofeminism is arguably one of the most interesting ones.

This article covers the role of Ancient Roman statesman and intellectual Marcus Tullius Cicero in the culture of the United States of America during the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly his influence on the formation of democracy in the US. While the recent decades have witnessed the increasing scholarly attention to the impact of Cicero on the early political culture of the US, the body of historical research, especially the Ukrainian one, lacks general analyses of Cicero’s role in the American political system during the emergence of the American state and its existence on the early stages of its history. After a general overview of the historical context of Cicero’s biography and legacy, this article pays a particular attention to his impact on the creation of United States democracy. A significant number of Cicero’s ideas, more or less, had been reflected in the concepts which defined the newly created American democracy. The most important concepts in this regard are the ideas of a republic government, private property, just laws, and forms of state structure. Apart from the general importance of Cicero’s ideas for the early American democracy, Marcus Tullius Cicero himself was a notable example for some Founding Fathers of the US, especially for the 2nd President John Adams. During the 19th century, Cicero continued to play a significant role in the American society, specially in the fields of education and public speaking.

The late 19th struggle for artistic freedom in the capitalist world-system put the artist in a contradictory position. This contradiction is particularly relevant for writers of the periphery. Freedom or autonomy to pursue purely intellectual projects required a certain aristocratic defense of the value of art. At the same time, however, artists and intellectuals did confront structural subordination: they belonged, as Pierre Bourdieu explained, to the dominated fractions of the dominant class, subordinated both to the state and the bourgeoisie. The life of Nicaraguan Ruben Darío (1867–1916), probably the most well-known poet in Latin American history, provides a paradigmatic instance of this dilemma. Moreover, it sheds light into a dilemma particular to the peripheral intellectual. Peripheral writers, in the 19th century and still today, are subject to world-systemic hierarchies, even cultural ones. This double subordination is clear in the case of Ruben Darío. He was in a subordinated position not only vis-à-vis the national state and the bourgeoisie. Darío was also in a subordinated position, even if symbolic, in relation to those same intellectuals that Bourdieu celebrated as creators of the autonomy of culture in France. One can account for this complex of hierarchies only through a 'world-systems biography' approach. World-systems biographies clearly examine the dialectic of personal, national and global levels of social life. Moreover, it can uncover the core-periphery dialectic in the realm of artistic production. Thus, this world-systems biography approach is shown to be a useful framework through a brief analysis of Darío's life and work.

While the antagonism of modernism to realism has often been commented upon, its equally vehement rejection of romanticism has not been as widely discussed. Yet, if modernism compromised at times with realism or, at least, with a "naturalistic" version of realism, its total antipathy to the fundamentals of romanticism has been absolute. This was a modernist trend that covered both literature and criticism and a modernist characteristic that extended from German philosophers, French poets to British and American professors of literature. Names as diverse as Paul Valery, Charles Maurras and F.R. Leavis shared a common anti-romantic outlook. Many of the important modernist literary trends like the Anglo-American imagism, French surrealism, German expressionism and Italian futurism have been antagonistic not only to ordinary realism as a relic of the 19th century, but also, and fundamentally, to that century's romanticism. In nihilistically breaking with everything from the past, or at least the immediate past, they were by definition anti-romantics. Even writers like Bernard Shaw or Bertolt Brecht and critics like Raymond Williams or George Lukacs, who would generally be regarded as in the pro-realist camp, have, at times, exhibited, to the extent that they were afflicted with the modernist ethos, strong anti-romantic tendencies.

The article examines from the positions of musical content by means of analysis of the musical and poetical the composition “Jephthah’s Daughter” by Amy Beach, an American composer of the late 19th and early 20th century, a member of the “Boston six” — a group of American composers of the turn of the century, also known as the New England School, among which Amy Beach was the only woman. “Jephthahʼs Daughter” is a concert aria for voice and orchestra, which is interesting in the context of the composer’s musical legacy, as well as an exemplary composition of its era. The aria is devoted to the Biblical subject matter or, more precisely, the well-known Old Testament plot of the sacrifi ce of the daughter of the Israelite judge Jephthah. Besides the analysis of the musical fabric, the article examines the author’s approach to the subject of the principle of the choice of the material and the work with the textual sources — the Biblical story and the French poem, which comprised the basis of the aria’s text. As a result, the conclusion is arrived at about the composer’s artistic intentions and about the conceptual component of the work. The article contains information about Amy Beach’s biography, her artistic approach, her attitude to religious subject matter and social problems of the society contemporary to her, in particular, the issues of equal rights for women.

On May 21, 1927, at 10:24 p.m., Charles Lindbergh gently touched down on French soil, the first person to fly the Atlantic alone. Immediately, the world had a new hero — mobbed wherever he went, the recipient of thousands of letters and poems, the inspiration for popular as well as classical music. But what, exactly, Lindbergh meant to his generation and subsequent generations has remained a source of interest and controversy. In “The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight” (1958), for example, John W. Ward argued that Lindbergh revealed a deep tension in the American public: “Was the flight the achievement of a heroic, solitary, unaided individual or did the flight represent the triumph of the machine, the success of an industrially organized society?” Twenty-two years later, Laurence Goldstein, in “Lindbergh in 1927: The Response of Poets to the Poem of Fact” (1980), was less certain how to know the significance of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. But he did argue that Lindbergh's problematic relationship to the “idealizing tendency of popular discourse” was itself a way to understand his complex response to his times and his achievement. More recently, Susan M. Gray, in Charles Lindbergh and the American Dilemma: The Conflict of Technology and Human Values (1988), argued that Lindbergh is best understood as a case study of a larger American issue, the “dialectical tension between technology and human values.” Not only did Lindbergh reveal the complex tensions noted by Ward and Goldstein, but, more fundamentally, he revealed the dialectical imagination characteristic of American thinking since the early 19th century.

Sir Victor Horsley was a pioneering British neurosurgeon known for his numerous neurosurgical, scientific, and sociopolitical contributions. Although word of these surgical and scientific achievements quickly spread throughout Europe and North America in the late 19th century, much of modern neurosurgery’s view of Horsley has been colored by a single anecdote from John Fulton’s biography of Harvey Cushing. In this account, Cushing observes a frenetic Horsley hastily removing a Gasserian ganglion from a patient in the kitchen of a British mansion. Not long after, Cushing left Britain saying that he had little to learn from British neurosurgery. The authors of this paper examined contemporary views of Horsley to assess what his actual reputation was in the US and Canada. The authors conducted a thorough search of references to Horsley using the following sources: American surgical and neurosurgical textbooks; major biographies; diary entries and letters; PubMed; newspaper articles; and surgical and neurosurgical texts. The positive reception of his work is corroborated by invitations for Horsley to speak in America. Research additionally revealed that Horsley had numerous personal and professional relationships with prominent Americans in medicine, including William Osler, John Wheelock Elliot, Ernest Sachs, and (yes) Harvey Cushing. Horsley’s contributions to medicine and science were heavily reported in American newspapers; outside of neurosurgery, his strong opposition to the antivivisectionists and his support for alcohol prohibition were widely reported in popular media. Horsley’s contributions to neurosurgery in America are undeniable. Writings from and about prominent Americans reveal that he was viewed favorably by those who had met him. Frequent publication of his views in the American media suggests that medical professionals and the public in the US valued his contributions on scientific as well as social issues. Horsley died too young, but not without the international recognition that was rightly his.

Gotthard Deutsch (1859–1921) taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati from 1891 until his death, where he produced a card index of 70,000 ‘facts’ of Jewish history. This article explores the biography of this artefact of research and poses the following question: Does Deutsch’s index constitute a great unwritten work of history, as some have claimed, or are the cards ultimately useless ‘chips from his workshop’? It may seem a curious relic of positivistic history, but closer examination allows us to interrogate the materiality of scholarly labor. The catalogue constitutes a total archive and highlights memory’s multiple registers, as both a prosthesis for personal recall and a symbol of a ‘human encyclopedia’. The article argues that this mostly forgotten scholar’s work had surprising repercussions: Deutsch’s student Jacob Rader Marcus (1896–1995) brought his teacher’s emphasis on facticity to the field of American Jewish history that he pioneered, catapulting a 19th-century positivism to the threshold of the 21st century. Deutsch’s index was at an inflection point of knowledge production, created as historians were shifting away from ‘facts’ but just before new technologies (also based on cards) enabled ‘big data’ on a larger scale. The article thus excavates a vision of monumentality but proposes we look past these objects as monuments to ‘heroic’ scholarship. Indeed, Deutsch’s index is massive but middling, especially when placed alongside those of Niklas Luhmann, Paul Otlet, or Gershom Scholem. It thus presents a necessary corrective to anointing such indexes as predecessors to the Internet and big data because we must keep their problematic positivism in perspective.

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

Background. George Gershwin is often considered as a composer who wrote mainly songs and musicals, but this is a misconception: beside the pieces of so-called “light” genres, among the composer’ works – two operas, as well as a number of outstanding instrumental compositions (“Cuban Overture” for a symphony orchestra, two Rhapsodies, Variations for piano and orchestra and Piano Concerto etc.). Gershwin had a natural pianistic talent, and there was almost not a single piece of his own that he did not perform on the piano, and most of them were born in improvisation (Ewen, 1989). The basis for the creation of this study was the desire to increase interest in the work of Gershwin as a “serious” composer and to draw the attention of domestic academic pianists to the value of his piano works, presented not only the “Rhapsody in Blue”, which has been mostly played lately. The purpose of our research is to prove the relevance of the performance of Gershwin’s instrumental works in the academic concert environment as the music of the classical tradition, tracing the formation of specific features of the composer’s instrumental creativity and their reflection in the cycle of “Three Preludes for Piano” in 1926. Studies of the life and work of G. Gershwin, illuminating a special path in music and the unusual genius of an outstanding musician, were created mainly in the 50–70s of the XX century. D. Ewen – the author of the most detailed biography of the composer (first published in 1956, the Russian translation – in 1989) – was personally acquainted with the great musician and his family, took numerous interviews from the composer’s relatives, friends and teachers, had access to his archives (Ewen, 1989: 3–4). The author of the book enters into the details of the life and creative work of the genius and creates a portrait of the composer as a person “in relationships” – as a son, brother, friend. A separate chapter devoted to the music of Gershwin is in the fundamental work of V. Konen (1965) “The Ways of American Music”, an extremely useful study of the folklore origins and musical foundations of jazz. Cognitive is the “popular monograph” by V. Volynskiy (1988) about Gershwin, carefully structured chronologically and thematically. The Internet-pages of A. Tikhomirov (2006–2020) on the resource “Classic Music News.ru” are also very valuable, in particular, thanks to retrospective photographs and audio recordings posted there. From the point of view we have chosen, the piano Preludes by G. Gershwin have not yet been considered by domestic researchers. Research methodology is based on comparative analysis and then synthesizing, generalization and abstraction when using data from biographical literature, and tested musicological approaches when considering musical samples and audio recordings of various versions of the Preludes (including the author’s playing). The results of reseaching. G. Gershwin, despite his Jewish-Slavic family roots (his parents emigrated to America from the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century), is undoubtedly a representative of American culture. Outstanding artists have almost always turned to the folklore of their country. In Gershwin, this trait manifested itself in a special way, since American folklore, due to historical and political circumstances, is a very motley phenomenon. Indian, English, German, French, Jewish, African, Latin American melodies surrounded Gershwin everywhere. Their rhythms and intonations, compositional schemes were melted, transformed in professional music (Konen, 1965: 231–246). The first musical teacher of Gershwin was the sound atmosphere of New York streets. This is the main reason that the style of his musical works is inextricably linked with jazz: Gershwin did not encounter this purely American phenomenon, he grew up in it. Among the numerous other teachers of Gershwin who significantly influenced on the formation of his music style, one should definitely name the pianist and composer Charles Hambitzer, who introduced his student to the music of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Ravel (Ewen, 1989: 30–32). The most part of Gershwin’s creativity consisted of working on musicals, a typically American genre. The work with the musicals gave the composer the basis for writing his first jazz opera “Blue Monday“, 1922 (other name – “135th Street”), which became the predecessor of the famous pearl of the new genre, “Porgy and Bess” (1935). Following the production of “Blue Monday”, Gershwin began collaborating with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, who was impressed by the piece. On the initiative of the latter, Gershwin created his masterpiece, “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), which still remains a unique musical phenomenon, since the composer brought jazz to the big stage, giving it the status of professional music (Ewen, 1989: 79–85; Volynskiy, 1988: part 4). V. Konen (1965: 264–265) believes that Gershwin is a representative of symphonic Europeanized jazz, since he uses it in musical forms and genres of the European tradition. However, we cannot agree that Gershwin “used” jazz. For him, jazz was organic, inseparable from the author’s style, and this is what makes his music so attractive to representatives of both classical and pop traditions. For Gershwin, due to life circumstances, turning to jazz is not an attempt at stylization, but a natural way of expression. “Three Preludes for Piano” are significant in the composer’s work, because it is the only known concertо work for solo piano published during his lifetime. At first, Gershwin planned to create a cycle of 24 Preludes, but only seven were created in the manuscript, then the author reduced the number of works to five. A year after the creation of the Piano Concerto, in 1926, Gershwin presented this new opus. The pieces performed by the author himself sound impeccably technically and even austerely-strictly (audio recording has been preserved, see ‘Gershvin plays Gershvin 3 Preludes’, video on You Tube, published on 2 Aug. 2011). It can be noted that Gershwin is close to the European pianistic style with its attention to the accuracy of each note. The cycle is built on the principle of contrasting comparison: the first and third Preludes are performed at a fast pace, the second – at a slow pace (blues-like). The analysis of the cycle, carried out by the author of the article, proves that “Three Preludes” for piano reflect the main features of Gershwin’s creative manner: capriciousness of syncopated rhythms, subtle modulation play, improvisational development. Breathing breadth, volumetric texture, effective highlighting of climaxes bring the cycle closer to the composer’s symphonic works. Jazz themes are laid out at a high professional level, using traditional European notation and terminology. Thus, although Gershwin was a brilliant improviser, he made it possible for both jazz pianists and academic performers to master his works. Conclusions. The peculiarities of Gershwin’s development as an artist determined the combination of the jazz basis of his works with the compositional technique of European academic music. The versatility and musical appeal of the Preludes are the key to their long stage life. Plays are well received both in cycles and singly. Their perception is also improved by the fact that the original musical speech is combined in them with the established forms of academic music. The mastery of the Preludes by pianists stimulates the development of technical skill, acquaints with jazz style, sets interesting rhythmic problems. The pieces are bright and winning for concert performance. Thus, the presence of the composer’s piano pieces and other his instrumental works in the programs of classical concerts seems appropriate, useful and desirable.

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

Объектом внимания в статье является творчество видного представителя русской литературы 1й половины XX века Сергея Митрофановича Городецкого, чей литературный путь начинается в контексте отечественной литературы конца XIX начала XX в., в сложную, противоречивую эпоху, насыщенную драматическими событиями. Имя Городецкого связывается с явлением, получившим название Серебряного века русской литературы. Он один из тех, кто стал неотъемлемой частью богатейшего культурного процесса первых десятилетий прошлого века, давшего миру А. Ахматову, А. Блока, В. Брюсова, К. Бальмонта, Н. Гумилева, М. Волошина, О. Мандельштама, С. Есенина и многих других. Это время творческих исканий и блестящих открытий, переосмысления идей, старых литературных направлений, методов и стилей и формирования новых. Творчество Городецкого занимает достойное место в этом процессе, но не ограничивается рамками Серебряного века . Его долгая творческая жизнь отличается удивительным разнообразием, многогранностью талантов и интересов. Его перу были подвластны поэзия и романная проза, публицистика и драматургия, поэтические переводы и литературоведческие статьи, оперные либретто и рассказы. Природа не обделила Городецкого и художественными способностями в его наследие вошли портретные зарисовки, дружеские шаржи, книжные и журнальные иллюстрации. Особую страницу составила его просветительская и преподавательская деятельность. В статье представлена та часть творчества Городецкого, которая связана с Осетией, ее фольклором, литературой, этнографией, культурным строительством и просвещением и которая осталась в его творческой биографии почти незамеченной. Знакомство Городецкого с Осетией началось с Нартовского эпоса, который оставил значительный след в его наследии. В статье рассмотрен авторизованный перевод нартовской легенды Ацамаз и Агунда , а также цикл очерков СагатИр , опубликованные Городецким в газете Известия в 1926 г. как результат его путешествия по горной Осетии в качестве корреспондента газеты. Цикл отразил не только журналистский дар поэта, но и его интерес к фольклору, этнографии, истории и языку осетин. С Осетией связана еще одна грань творчества Городецкого его перу принадлежит ряд оперных либретто. Одно из них написано на сюжет Нартовского и Даредзановского эпосов. Городецкий в древних эпических сюжетах выразил созвучные его времени идеи свободного труда, преодоления племенной розни, насилия, тяжелого положения женщиныгорянки. Героем оперы становится осетинский Прометей Амран , в ней также присутствуют Ацамаз, Агунда, Курдалагон. Опера Амран была поставлена на сцене Большого театра, а ее либретто было удостоено премии. Городецкий был знаком с осетинскими писателями и поэтами, портретные зарисовки которых, сделанные во время декады осетинского искусства и литературы в Москве, хранятся в фонде С.М. Городецкого в Научном архиве СОИГСИ. Там же находятся рукописные автографы белового и чернового вариантов стихотворения Городецкого Памяти Коста Хетагурова , жизнь и творчество которого вызывали интерес и восхищение русского поэта. В статье также нашла отражение просветительская деятельность Городецкого, связанная с Северной Осетией. The object of attention in the article is the work of the prominent representative of the Russian literature of the 1st half of the 20th century Sergei Gorodetsky, whose literary way begins in the context of Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and into a complex, controversial era, full of dramatic events. Gorodetskys name is associated with the phenomenon known as the Silver Age of the Russian literature. He is one of those who became an integral part of the richest cultural process of the first decades of the last century, alongside with A. Akhmatova, A. Blok, V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, N. Gumilyov, M. Voloshin, O. Mandelstam, S. Yesenin and many others. This is a time of creative searches and brilliant discoveries, reconsidering ideas, old literary trends, methods and styles and the formation of new ones. Gorodetskys work takes significant place in this process, but is not limited to the framework of the Silver Age. His long creative life is remarkable for its amazing diversity, versatility of talents and interests. He was good at poetry and novel prose, journalism and dramaturgy, poetry translations and literary articles, opera librettos and short stories. Нis heritage included portrait sketches, friendly cartoons, book and magazine illustrations. He is also famous for his educational and teaching activities. The article presents that part of S. Gorodetskys work, which is associated with Ossetia, its folklore, literature, ethnography, cultural construction and education, which almost went unnoticed in his creative biography. Gorodetskys acquaintance with Ossetia began with the Narts epic, which left a significant mark on his heritage. The article deals with the authorized translation of the Narts legend Atsamaz and Agunda, as well as the series of essays SagatIr published by S. Gorodetsky in the newspaper Izvestia in 1926 as a result of his travels through mountainous Ossetia as a newspaper correspondent. The cycle reflected not only the journalistic talent of the poet, but also his interest in folklore, ethnography, history and the language of the Ossetians. Another aspect of Gorodetskys work connected with Ossetia is number of opera librettos. One of them is based on the plot of the Narts and Daredzan epics. Gorodetsky expressed the ideas of his time: free labour, overcoming tribal hatred, violence, and the plight of female highlanders in ancient epic plots. The Ossetian Prometheus Amran becomes the hero of the opera Atsamaz, Agunda, and Kurdalagon also taking part in it. The opera was staged at the Bolshoi Theater, and its libretto received an award. Gorodetsky was familiar with Ossetian writers and poets, whose portrait sketches, made during the decade of Ossetian art and literature in Moscow, are stored in the S. Gorodetsky collection in the Scientific Archive of the Institute for Humanitarian and Social Studies. There are manuscript autographs of Gorodetskys poem In Memoriam of KostaKhetagurov, whose life and work the Russian poetadmired. The article also reviews the educational activities of S. Gorodetsky related to North Ossetia.

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. 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Tiffany is running down a suburban street with headphones and a hoodie on. Her breath is clearly audible, rhythmic, steady, and in pace with her footsteps. The Tiffany’s Story video testimonial on the Be Smart. Be Well. website then cuts to Tiffany sitting at home describing her earlier experiences with asthma: “The hospital became like my second home... I couldn’t breathe on my own.” Dr. Wolf, who has been treating Tiffany since she was diagnosed with asthma at age 8, joins in, “At that time she had really severe asthma. It was very difficult to manage and remained very difficult to manage for many years” (Be Smart. Be Well). As a child, Tiffany could never run, with steady breath, as she did at the beginning of the video, titled The Right Meds Keep Her in the Ring (Be Smart. Be Well). But after figuring out a treatment regime that worked, Tiffany became a healthy teenager; the video features her in contexts where she is jogging, smiling radiantly with her mother, and holding up victory belts from her boxing matches. From a child unable to breathe on her own, to a teenager with dreams of going to the Olympics, Tiffany’s asthma story underscores some of the defining narratives of contemporary asthma care. Her experience moves from uncontrolled asthma that limited her activities to a well-managed condition where she is able to pursue her aspirations without interference. Her Olympic dreams fit perfectly, reproduce even, the iconic image of the asthmatic athlete. It’s an image that has been in circulation since the early years of the contemporary asthma epidemic, a moment in the 1990s when federal health agencies and advocacy organizations worked to give the growing population of child asthmatics hope and encouragement to overcome their asthma. Yet the figure of the athletic asthmatic, and other accomplished icons with well-controlled asthma, also promotes an idealized image of health: “you can be greater than you are,” when you take your medication. The messages, of course, are well intentioned, designed to educate and show kids that asthma does not equate with disability. Yet these messages frequently work on logic where drugs control symptoms to enable you to do better in life. In some corners of asthma care, concern with symptoms is subsumed by narratives of activity and accomplishment. This article sketches shifts in the meaning of health and disease in the context of asthma treatment, moving from a time when treatments were not disease-specific and illness was seen as debilitating, to the contemporary moment where pharmaceutical companies market disease and promote health through direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA). It’s a move situated within a broader, biomedicalized context where health isn’t just achieved, it’s augmented. Tiffany’s story is typical of someone with severe or even moderate asthma: uncontrolled symptoms, use of emergency care, unresponsive to medications, and an inability to live life as fully as desired. Symptoms and the threat of symptoms prevent people from undertaking routine activities (such as exercise, visiting friends, or attending work or school) and going into spaces that might trigger an attack. Asthma, in other words, can prevent people from living a “normal” life. But it can also be more than a chronic inconvenience that shapes behaviors; in the U.S., asthma still kills more than 3,000 people each year (Moorman et al. 20). Medical practitioners, researchers, and patients persistently search for insight into asthma’s causes and possible cures (Whitmarsh). Both cause and cure still allude, but preventative measures have improved dramatically in the last thirty years, through both pharmaceutical advancements and better public health approaches. Whereas a century ago, or even 30 years ago, severe asthmatics would have lead quite restricted lives—confined to their homes and unable to be active—today’s asthmatics are not limited by their condition to the degree they were decades before. We see this in asthma research that shows improved morbidity, decreased hospitalizations, and better quality of life (Moorman et al. 1-67). We also see this in DTCA, asthma advocacy campaigns, and even public health messages that actively combat the historic image of the weak, invalid asthmatic with stories of famous athletes, entertainers, or politicians who overcame asthma to achieve great things. It moves the discourse from an overly negative image—as one asthmatic interlocutor conveyed, “there was a stereotype in the 80s, in the movies, where the nerdy wimpy kid always had asthma, and the inhaler was associated with that”—to an extraordinarily positive image of high achieving asthmatics. Inhalers, formerly a sign of weakness, are now common in competitive sport contexts (Arie 344). The contrast between these representations—the 1980s nerdy wimp and the 21st century athlete—is stark. The latter image participates in the shift towards augmented health, where active bodies have become the new idealized norm. The shifting representations of asthmatics, even over the last twenty years, makes sense in the context of biomedicalization (Clarke et al. 172), where treatment regimes moved from a focus on “attaining control over the body” under medicalization, to “enabling the transformation of bodies to include desired new properties and identities” (Clarke et al. 183). The right treatment will allow you to do things that your body wouldn’t let you do otherwise. The question is: should treatment be sold on this premise? What would have been considered a return to health a hundred years ago wouldn’t be considered doing enough to manage your asthma today. A hundred years ago, the absence of symptoms would have been a success; today, the focus is on the degree to which one feels limited and how much you can accomplish in the span of 24-hours. Missed school and work days are a key measure in asthma epidemiology and care; these public health measures not only signal uncontrolled asthma, but do so by counting absence in the context of labor. The discursive shift can also be seen in the change from the urge to “breathe easy” (language from the Centers for Disease Control) to suggestions in pharmaceutical ads that you can “breathe better.” What new selves are being created by emergent health rhetorics, as Metzel asks (6), rhetorics which seem to be consumerist and neoliberal as much as they are biomedical? Role Reversal Historically, those with severe asthma led their lives carefully, or in reclusion. French novelist Marcel Proust, in addition to his literary accomplishments, spent much of his life confined to his home. Despite searching through medical texts and experimenting with various treatments, Proust’s asthma “dominated” his daily life, in the words of Mark Jackson (6). Writing of asthma’s history, Jackson continues, Proust constitutes the archetypal asthmatic, whose breathlessness and discomfort echo across space and time. Proust’s intimate descriptions of his symptoms—‘an asthmatic never knows if he will be able to breathe’ he wrote to the novelist Andre Gide in 1919—bear striking similarities both to Greek and medieval accounts of asthma many centuries earlier and to recent surveys suggesting that, at the turn of the millennium, many asthmatics continue to suffer from severe attacks that prevent them from speaking or make them fear for their lives. (8) In Proust’s time, advertisements for asthma and other respiratory treatments focused on providing symptom relief; some even purported to cure respiratory woes. These advertisements were rarely asthma specific, in part, because manufacturers sought the widest possible customer base, but also because it was difficult to distinguish one respiratory illness from another (Jackson 201). Asthmatics like Proust tried a range of remedies, including asthma cigarettes, the Carbolic Smoke Ball, and various forms of early inhalers. Most of these early asthma remedies instructed customers to use their product when in need of relief. Some ads stated that more regular use could stave off symptoms as well remedy them in the moment, but prevention wasn’t the primary message. The principle focus was addressing symptoms at hand. Just about a hundred years later, at the beginning of the U.S. asthma epidemic, symptoms were still center stage. National attention turned towards the asthmatic condition as the public health effects of severe asthma became visible—asthma-related deaths and hospitalizations had increased, along with rising prevalence rates. Asthma—formerly kept hidden in homes and in low-income communities—emerged as a major public health issue (Mitman 245). Advocacy campaigns were created on the heels of the epidemic’s emergence; they aimed to make asthma visible and show kids that their condition didn’t have to get in the way of life. Elite athletes became central figures in these campaigns. The Asthma All-Stars program, which featured Olympic medalists Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Amy Van Dyken, as well as Pittsburgh Steeler Jerome Bettis, worked to educate the public through acknowledgement of the condition as well as treatment advocacy. The National Library of Medicine’s exhibit on asthma, “Breath of Life” (1999), exemplifies this period with a showcase of famous asthmatics. In the exhibit, more than half the profiles of contemporary asthmatics feature Olympic or all-star athletes; entertainers, politicians, and scientists round out the exhibit. The legacy of the asthmatic athlete persists today; it’s still common to see sports figures speaking at fundraisers or spearheading events. These images are important, particularly for patient populations who truly feel limited and unable to do things because of their asthma. Athletes who speak about their condition are always clear: well-controlled asthma comes from adherence to treatment. The importance of these images also stems from the use of the image of the All-Star asthmatic to counter the historical stereotype of the weak, invalid asthmatic, who, like Proust, could not even leave the house. The man who recalled the stereotyped asthmatic from the 1980s, stated “I think I mapped myself onto that [stereotype], like, this is a disability, right, the media tells me this is a disability cause it’s always the kids who can’t do anything who are puffing their puffers.” In step with emergent 21st century health rhetoric, and increasing asthma prevalence, the image of the asthmatic was revised, falling in line with newly normalized health ideals (Clarke et al. 181; Metzel 2; Sinding 262). Active Asthmatics If 19th and early 20th century inhaler advertisements declared their products could relieve if not cure respiratory symptoms, at the beginning of the 21st century asthma treatment went beyond simply relieving symptoms; advertisements and medical discourse emphasized preventative symptom control, improved lung function, and better breathing. With the development of long-term controller medications, many asthmatics could reliably prevent symptoms a majority of the time. When combination inhalers hit the market in the early 2000s, the mood of advertisements could be summed up by a line from a GlaxoSmithKline commercial, “Coping is not the same as controlling” (GlaxoSmithKline). Prevention rather than symptom relief was the order of the new century. And yet just in the last ten years, pharmaceutical messages have shifted yet again, moving from an emphasis on controlling symptoms to living a better life: don’t let asthma slow you down, or stop you from living the life you want to live. It’s a message predicated on a particular view of what a normal life should look like, one characterized as augmented health. A 2012 Advair commercial reflects the tone of augmented health, “Asthma can hold you back, but it doesn’t always have to. Advair is clinically proven to significantly increase symptom free days, to help you do more of the things you like to do, more of the things you have to do, and more of what you want to do” (Advair). Strategically placed throughout the commercial, a voice chimes in “GO!” as the hero of the commercial, a middle aged asthmatic man, bikes down a wooded trail; moves through a busy hallway where he greets one person after the next, all of whom hand him file folders or blue prints; dances at a nightclub; and walks down bleachers to join a group of friends at a ballgame. The commercial ends with the man arriving home well after dark, comfortably settling into bed, and then energetically waking up to do it all over again the next day. Marked by words like increase, more, and go, the Advair commercial depicts a life full of activity. Not only that, the commercial leverages contexts that are commonly problematic for asthmatics: being outside and in foliage rich areas; biking and dancing, or other physical activities that could leave one breathless; and sleeping comfortably—nighttime attacks are common among asthmatics. The message is clear: look at all the things asthmatics can do when their condition is well controlled—with Advair, of course. It’s a message that builds on an earlier trend in asthma advocacy, during the 1990s, when well-known asthmatic athletes were used to bring visibility to asthma. If asthma control in the 1990s emphasized that asthmatics didn’t need to be held back, 21st century ads suggest that one could do more. By augmenting your health, asthma control can transform your life by allowing you to do more.Today, DTCA for asthma drugs are just as likely to emphasize improved lung function as they are symptom control, and, as advertised in the Advair commercial, improved lung function enables one to do more. A man featured in a 2012 Symbicort commercial explains, “Symbicort helps significantly improve my lung function, starting within five minutes… With Symbicort, today I’m breathing better” (Symbicort). The man’s renewed capacity to go on fishing trips with loved ones is the example in this commercial. Control, relief, and cure are nowhere to be found in these DTC advertisements; symptoms have been dropped from the frame. Rather than work off illness, or the older stereotype of the weak, homebound asthmatic, the new wave of DTCA champions augmented health: a higher quality of life, where patient-consumers can “do” whatever they like. What would have been considered a return to normal a hundred years ago, in Proust’s time, wouldn’t be considered doing enough to manage your asthma today. A hundred years ago, getting out of the house would have been enough; today, it’s a question of how much can you accomplish in the span of 24-hours. The portrayal of health in these DTCA calls to mind Lauren Berlant’s description of OTC cold medicine, which claim to make you feel better, but are really more concerned with making sure people can stay productive (28). Conclusion Had Proust lived a century later, he may have, like Tiffany, led a less restricted life. Or as Dr. Wolf put it, “A normal life. Busy and as active as she’d like to be. But she needs to take medication to do it” (Be Well. Be Smart). Symptom-free doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. Contemporary images of asthmatics—as an all-star athlete, an aspiring boxer, and a hyper-busy city dweller—are shaped by an imagined healthy norm. Advocacy campaigns originally intended to combat long-standing negative representations partake in the promotion of augmented health. Increasingly, health is no longer defined by the absence of symptoms, but by how active you are and how much you do. Busy and productive is a gold standard of the idealized norm, a norm that circulates—to a greater or lesser extent—in direct-to-consumer advertising, asthma advocacy campaigns, and public health messages (Sinding 262). Without doubt, the pharmaceutical industry plays a tremendous role in shaping contemporary health norms. Yet, as Joseph Dumit describes it, "the pharmaceutical industry is a massive elephant. Like the blind men of the famous parable, we each catch a hold of a tiny piece of it -- leg, tail, trunk -- and think we have a handle on it" (18). A powerful force with influence on many aspects of contemporary life, the pharmaceutical industry could be understood through the lens of biomedicalization: Biomedicalization imposes new mandates and performances that become incorporated into one’s sense of self. The subjectivities that arise out of these performances of what it is to be healthy (e.g., proactive, prevention-conscious, neo-rational) suggest how biomedical technoscience indicates a type of governmentality that can enact itself at the level of subjective identities and social relations. (Clarke et al. 182) Disease marketing—prevalent in the 1990s—is no longer needed or effective; health marketing has taken over and pharmaceutical companies are not at the table alone (Elliott 97). Instead of working through disease difference, health marketing attempts to level ground through images and standards that everyone can work towards, asthmatics included. Of course, pharmaceutical marketing simultaneously renders invisible socioeconomic conditions that contribute to asthma incidence, and marginalized populations that struggle to access medication and medical care in the first place. Augmented health works to flatten difference across social, economic, political, and ecological scales, as if these inequalities didn’t matter for disease management. Scholars writing about emergent modes of health—how health is imagined, constructed, studied, and sold—have documented how new health regimes work off potential risk categories, race, class, and gendered ideologies, or hoped-for modes of living. Some are literally “against health” (the title of Metzel and Kirkland’s edited volume). But to be against health, as Metzel writes is not to be against needed treatment (9). To examine the ways in which DTCA or advocacy campaigns promote specific, idealized images of health—images where people are athletic, outgoing, and busy—and question whether these drugs go above and beyond the restoration of health, should not be equated with a statement about whether medication is necessary. Epidemiological evidence and clinical studies are clear that contemporary treatments help reduce the burden of asthma in various ways: through reduced hospitalizations, lower death rates, and better-controlled asthma. Drugs keep many asthmatics relatively symptom-free. The point, rather, is that health is complex, structured by various institutions, actors, politics, and materials. One of the valences of the new health regime is augmented health, seen in the context of this paper at work in DTCA and possibly emerging in other corners of the asthma care arena as well. To date, most writing on augmentation has focused on how advancements in science and technology extend the capacity of human bodies—from prosthetics and fertility drugs, to steroids and life support (Hogle 696). Less has been written on the ways in which chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and asthma—conditions where life hinges on medications, but are common enough that they are deemed unexceptional—produce a rhetoric of augmentation; where the new healthy is augmented living. It’s not the drugs for life rhetoric that works off new risk categories, as Dumit has shown (201); asthmatics are symptomatic, always at risk anyways, and often already on drugs for life. Drugs for chronic conditions like asthma may simply control symptoms, but they’re increasingly sold on the promise of enhancing life capacities as well. As Elliott has observed, it’s part of a move from disease marketing to health marketing (97). The discursive shift in asthma care, and perhaps other chronic disease contexts as well, doesn’t register as enhancement or augmentation because it mirrors the new health norm that is part of the broader context of biomedicalization. As the frame of health shifts, questions about bodies, ethics, and enhancement technologies might need to shift as well. Linda Hogle’s question is apt here: “what is necessary to sustain health? At which point does repair become something more than restorative, and for which (and whose) purposes are interventions defined as 'therapeutic'” (697). Since health norms have become augmented in the last ten years, this question becomes all the more difficult to answer. Within these new health regimes, potential has not only become open-ended, it also seems to be a therapeutic goal. References Arie, Sophie. “What Can We Learn from Asthma in Elite Athletes?” British Medical Journal 344 (2012). Be Smart. Be Well. “The Right Meds Keep Her in the Ring.” Be Smart. Be Well. 14 Aug. 2013. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.besmartbewell.com/childhood-asthma/tiffany.htm›. Clarke, Adele, Janet Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Fosket, and Jennifer Fishman. “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine.” American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 161-194. Dumit, Joseph. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health. 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(Iris Fleßenkämper, Münster) Freitag, Werner / Wilfried Reininghaus (Hrsg.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Reformation in Westfalen, Bd. 1: „Langes“ 15. Jahrhundert, Übergänge und Zäsuren. Beiträge der Tagung am 30. und 31. Oktober 2015 in Lippstadt (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 35), Münster 2017, Aschendorff, 352 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Andreas Rutz, Düsseldorf) Hartmann, Thomas F., Die Reichstage unter Karl V. Verfahren und Verfahrensentwicklung 1521 – 1555 (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 100), Göttingen / Bristol 2017, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 370 S., € 70,00. (Reinhard Seyboth, Regensburg) Der Reichstag zu Regensburg 1541, 4 Teilbde., bearb. v. Albrecht P. Luttenberger (Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Jüngere Reihe, 11), Berlin / Boston 2018, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 3777 S., € 598,00. (Eva Ortlieb, Graz) Putten, Jasper van, Networked Nation. Mapping German Cities in Sebastian Münster’s „Cosmographia“ (Maps, Spaces, Cultures, 1), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XXIII u. 353 S. / Abb., € 135,00. (Felicitas Schmieder, Hagen) Müller, Winfried / Martina Schattkowski / Dirk Syndram (Hrsg.), Kurfürst August von Sachsen. Ein nachreformatorischer „Friedensfürst“ zwischen Territorium und Reich. Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Tagung vom 9. bis 11. Juli 2015 in Torgau und Dresden, Dresden 2017, Sandstein, 240 S. / Abb., € 28,00. (Vinzenz Czech, Potsdam) Haas, Alexandra, Hexen und Herrschaftspolitik. Die Reichsgrafen von Oettingen und ihr Umgang mit den Hexenprozessen im Vergleich (Hexenforschung, 17), Bielefeld 2018, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 319 S. / Abb., € 29,00. (Rainer Walz, Bochum) Flurschütz da Cruz, Andreas, Hexenbrenner, Seelenretter. 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(Olivia Spiridon, Tübingen) „wobei mich der liebe Gott wunderlich beschutzet“. Die Schreibkalender des Clamor Eberhard von dem Bussche zu Hünnefeld (1611 – 1666). Edition mit Kommentar, hrsg. v. Lene Freifrau von dem Bussche-Hünnefeld / Stephanie Haberer, [Bramsche] 2017, Rasch, 216 S. / Abb., € 34,50. (Helga Meise, Reims) Rohrschneider, Michael / Anuschka Tischer (Hrsg.), Dynamik durch Gewalt? Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (1618 – 1648) als Faktor der Wandlungsprozesse des 17. Jahrhunderts (Schriftenreihe zur Neueren Geschichte, 38; Neue Folge, 1), Münster 2018, Aschendorff, VII u. 342 S. / Abb., € 48,00. (Claire Gantet, Fribourg) Schloms, Antje, Institutionelle Waisenfürsorge im Alten Reich 1648 – 1806. Statistische Analyse und Fallbeispiele (Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, 129), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, 395 S., € 62,00. (Iris Ritzmann, Zürich) Mühling, Christian, Die europäische Debatte über den Religionskrieg (1679 – 1714). Konfessionelle Memoria und internationale Politik im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV. (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz, 250), Göttingen 2018, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 587 S., € 85,00. (Cornel Zwierlein, Bamberg) Dietz, Bettina, Das System der Natur. Die kollaborative Wissenskultur der Botanik im 18. Jahrhundert, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 216 S., € 35,00. (Flemming Schock, Leipzig) Friedrich, Markus / Alexander Schunka (Hrsg.), Reporting Christian Missions in the Eighteenth Century. Communication, Culture of Knowledge and Regular Publication in a Cross-Confessional Perspective (Jabloniana, 8), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz, 196 S., € 52,00. (Nadine Amsler, Frankfurt a. M.) Berkovich, Ilya, Motivation in War. The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe, Cambridge / New York 2017, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 280 S. / graph. Darst., £ 22,99. (Marian Füssel, Göttingen) Stöckl, Alexandra, Der Principalkommissar. Formen und Bedeutung sozio-politischer Repräsentation im Hause Thurn und Taxis (Thurn und Taxis Studien. Neue Folge, 10), Regensburg 2018, Pustet, VII u. 280 S., € 34,95. (Dorothée Goetze, Bonn) Wunder, Dieter, Der Adel im Hessen des 18. Jahrhunderts – Herrenstand und Fürstendienst. Grundlagen einer Sozialgeschichte des Adels in Hessen (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Hessen, 84), Marburg 2016, Historische Kommission für Hessen, XIV u. 844 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Alexander Kästner, Dresden) Mährle, Wolfgang (Hrsg.), Aufgeklärte Herrschaft im Konflikt. Herzog Carl Eugen von Württemberg 1728 – 1793. Tagung des Arbeitskreises für Landes- und Ortsgeschichte im Verband der württembergischen Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine am 4. und 5. Dezember 2014 im Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (Geschichte Württembergs, 1), Stuttgart 2017, Kohlhammer, 354 S. / Abb., € 25,00. 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Cut In 1964, William S. Burroughs' Nova Express is published. Part of the trilogy of books Burroughs wrote in the early 1960s (The Soft Cell and The Ticket That Exploded are the other two), Nova Express explores the problems that technology creates in the information age; and the ways in which language and thought have come under the influence of mass media. The book begins with a broad declaration against consumerism and corporate control: Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever - "For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out -" (Nova Express 3) Rather than opt for conventional narrative as a means of uncovering the problems ideology brings with media-driven mass consumption, in the early '60s, Burroughs develops a method of writing he calls "the cut-up". The cut-up method entails taking a page of writing (a newspaper, a poem, a novel, an advertisement, a speech) and cutting it down the middle twice so that four sections remain. One then rearranges the sections in random order to create a new page. Variations of the four section cut are permissible and can lead to further juxtapositions. The purpose of the cut-up is to disclose ideological positions within media, to recontextualise the language of media often taken for granted as natural and not as a socially and economically constructed act. Information has become addictive, Burroughs says, invoking the junkie as a metaphor for mass consumption. Its addictive state leads to hallucinations, distortions of what is real and what is illusion; what do we need to live, and what do we buy for mere consumption. The scanning pattern we accept as "reality" has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented towards total control - In order to retain control they have moved to monopolize and deactivate the hallucinogen drugs by effecting noxious alternations on a molecular level. (Nova Express 53) The cut-up provides a means to combat the "junky" in us all by revealing the powers of technology. In the end, the cut-up leads to a collagist practice of juxtaposition. As Burroughs and collaborator Byron Gysin explained in a later work, The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups (Burroughs and Gysin 29). Through its structure, Nova Express is a lesson in making cut-ups, a demonstration of how power might be undermined in the digital age. Paste In 1964, the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham began. Influenced by Raymond Williams' 1958 Culture and Society, the Birmingham School legitimized the reading of popular culture as a means to uncovering dominant ideologies and power structures within institutional systems. In particular, the center proposed structuring scholasticism so that the study of media texts would allow for the questioning of social and political practices. The Birmingham school advised that curriculae supplement their agendas with the question of class; the complex relationships between power, which is an easier term to establish in the discourses of culture than exploitation, and exploitation; the question of a general theory which could, in a critical way, connect together in a critical reflection different domains of life, politics, and theory, theory and practice, economic, political ideological questions, and so on; the notion of critical knowledge itself and the production of critical knowledge as a practice. (Hall 279) One of the Birmingham School's first works was Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's Popular Arts, which searched out ways to teach media. In particular, Hall and Whannel viewed popular culture as a place to teach the power of ideology. There is, in fact, a growing recognition that the media of mass communication play such a significant role in society, and especially in the lives of young people, that the school must embrace the study of their organization, content, and impact. But there is little agreement about how such studies should be carried out. Just what shall be studied? With what precise purpose? In what relationship to the established subjects? Ultimately the answer will depend upon our attitude towards these media, our social thinking about the kind of society in which they wield their influence and, in particular, our response to the things the media offer - individual films, television programmes, popular songs, etc. (Hall and Whannel 21) Today, the Birmingham School is recognised as the beginning of contemporary cultural studies. It answers Hall and Whannel by using texts from popular culture to uncover the semiotic cultural codes that make up popular discourse. These methods shed light on how supposedly naturally constructed messages contain deeper meanings and purposes. Mix In 1964, DJ Alan Freed was convicted of tax evasion as a result of his involvement in the payola record business scandal of 1962. Considered one of the first rock and roll DJs, Freed is often credited for breaking ‘50s racial barriers by playing African-American music on the airwaves and hosting largely attended African-American dances and concerts. Even though Freed didn't invent the phrase "rock and roll," he credited himself with the term's introduction into music vocabulary, a myth-making act with far reaching implications. As critic Nick Tosch writes: "Though he was certainly not the first who had done so; he was only the most influential of those who had - Freed [had] rinsed the Dixie Peach from its image, rendering it more agreeable to the palate of a greater public" (Tosch 9). In the same year of Freed's conviction, another legendary DJ, Murray the K, found fame again by following the Beatles around on their 1964 North American tour. Murray the K had been popular in the late '50s for "his wild stammering of syllables, fragments of words, black slang, and meaningless, rhythmical burbling" to make transitions between songs (Poschardt 75). Mass copying of Murray the K's DJ stylings led to his redundancy. When New Journalist Tom Wolfe rediscovered the DJ tagging along with the Beatles, he became intrigued, describing him as "the original hysterical disk jockey": Murray the K doesn't operate on Aristotelian logic. He operates on symbolic logic. He builds up an atmosphere of breathless jollification, comic hysteria, and turns it up to a pitch so high it can hypnotize kids and keep them frozen. (Wolfe 34) While Freed introduced African-American culture to mainstream music, Murray the K's DJing worked from a symbolic logic of appropriation: sampled sounds, bits and pieces of eccentric outtakes used as vehicles to move from song to song. Both Freed and Murray the K, however, conceived the idea of the DJ as more than a spinner of records. They envisioned the DJ as a form of media, a myth maker, a composer of ideas through sounds and politics. In a sense, they saw their work as disseminating social commentary on '60s racial politics and ideology, working from a fairly new innovation: the rock and roll record. Their DJ work became the model for contemporary hip hop artists. Instead of considering isolated train whistles or glass crashing (the technique of Murray the K) as sources for sampling, contemporary DJs and digital samplers cut and paste fragments from the history of popular music in order to compose new works, compositions which function as vehicles of cultural critique. Groups like Public Enemy and The Roots utilise their record collections to make political statements on drug usage, economic problems within the African-American community, and racism. For Tricia Rose, these artists are the cultural studies writers of the digital age. "Rappers are constantly taking dominant discursive fragments and throwing them into relief, destabilizing hegemonic discourses and attempting to legitimate counterhegemonic interpretations." (Rose 102) Remix The juxtaposition of these three events in 1964 marks an interesting place to consider the potential for new media and cultural studies. Such a juxtaposition answers the calls of Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler in their introduction to Cultural Studies, a collection of essays from the 1970s and 1980s. The editors suggest that cultural studies can be thought of, in some ways, as a collagist practice. The methodology of cultural studies provides an equally uneasy marker, for cultural studies in fact has no distinct methodology, no unique statistical, ethnomethodological, or textual analysis to call its own. Its methodology, ambiguous from the beginning, could best be seen as a bricolage. (2) For these editors, "Cultural studies needs to remain open to unexpected, unimagined, even uninvited possibilities" (3). To consider cultural studies from the perspective of 1964 is to evoke the unexpected, the unimagined, and the uninvited. It is to resituate the demands of cultural study within the context of new media - the legacy of Burroughs' cut-up reborn in the digital sampler. In response to the editors of Cultural Studies, I propose the practice of temporal juxtaposition as a way of critical writing. My initial juxtaposition of 1964 asserts that to teach such a practice, one must teach cutting and mixing. The Break The break, as a DJ method, is "any short captured sound whatsoever" (Eshun 14). The break motivates digital sampling; it provides the points from which samplers appropriate past works into their own: "Break beats are points of rupture in their former contexts, points at which the thematic elements of a musical piece are suspended and the underlying rhythms brought center stage. In the early stages of rap, these break beats formed the core of rap DJs' mixing strategies" (Rose 73-74). Breaks are determined by how DJs produce cuts in previously recorded music. "The cut is a command, a technical and conceptual operation which cuts the lines of association" (Eshun 16). For William Burroughs, cuts create shock in readers; they are tools for destroying ideology. "Once machine lines are cut, the enemy is helpless" (Ticket That Exploded 111). In Nova Express, Burroughs issues the command, "Cut word lines" (62). And in Naked Lunch, the cut provides a set of reading instructions, a way for readers to uncover Burroughs' own ideological positions. You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point . . . I have written many prefaces. . . Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book. (Naked Lunch 224 For Roland Barthes, a major influence on the founding of the Birmingham School, the How-To functioned as a place for cultural critique. Barthes felt that semiotic analysis could break ideological positions constructed in popular culture. Barthes used the How-To as one example of what he called mythologies, items of popular culture assumed to be natural but latent with ideological meanings. He treated the how-to tourist guide (how to enjoy yourself on vacation) as one such place for further analysis. The good natured image of "the writer on holiday" is therefore no more than one of these cunning mystifications which the Establishment practices the better to enslave its writers. (Barthes 30) Mythologies has inspired contemporary cultural studies. Dick Hebdige states that through Barthes' work, "It was hoped that the invisible temporary seam between language, experience and reality could be located and prised open through a semiotic analysis" (Hebdige 10). My juxtapositions of 1964, however, tell me that the How-To for cultural studies is cutting and pasting, not hermeneutical or semiotic analysis (i.e. What does this mean? What do these codes reveal?), which have long been cultural studies' focus. 1964 updates cultural studies practices by reinventing its methods of inquiry. 1964 forces academic study to ask: How would a contemporary cultural critic cut into cultural texts and paste selections into a new media work? The Sample Cuts and breaks become samples, authorial chosen selections. My sample comes from Walter Benjamin, an early DJ of media culture who discovered in 19th century Paris a source for a new compositional practice. Benjamin's unfinished Arcades project proposed that the task of the writer in the age of mechanical reproduction is to become a collector. "The collector was the true inhabitant of the interior" (Benjamin 168). Benjamin felt that the "poets find their refuse on the street" (79) preempting William Gibson's now often cited remark, "the street finds its own use for things" (Gibson 186) and modern DJs who build record collections by rummaging bargain street sales. I find in Benjamin's work a place to sample, a break for cutting into Burroughs' nova method. "The basic nova mechanism is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflict - This is done by dumping life forms with incompatible conditions of existence on the same planet" (Nova Express 53). Like Burroughs, Benjamin expressed interest in the ideological conflicts created through juxtaposition. His collections of the Parisian Arcades led to a cultural history different from that of the Frankfurt School. The Arcades' juxtapositions of consumer goods and artifacts opposed the Frankfurt School's understandings of Marxism and methods of critique. The conflict I create is that of incorporating the concerns of cultural studies into media study as an alternative practice. This practice is a system of sampling, cutting, breaking, and pasting. What might initially seem incompatible to cultural studies, I propose as a method of critique. My initial juxtaposition of 1964 becomes the first step towards doing so: I critique current cultural studies' methods of semiotic and hermeneutical analysis by way of the cut and mix I create. This Benjamin sample is pasted onto the Networked Writing Environment (NWE) at the University of Florida where I teach media classes in one of several computer networked classrooms. Working from a sampled Benjamin and the juxtaposition of the previously described temporal events of 1964, I see a place to rethink new media and cultural studies. The NWE's graphical user interface completes the cut. Our Unix operating system uses X Windows for desktop display. The metaphor of the X, the slash, the cut, becomes a place to rethink what cultural studies admits to be a cut-up, or a non-unified practice (as stated by Grossberg et al). The X also recalls the crossroads, the iconic marker of the place of decision. Standing at the crossroads, I envision the blues song of the same name, which in 1964 was cut from its Robert Johnson origins and remixed as a new recording by the Yardbirds. This decision shifts the focus of media study to cultural collections, their juxtapositions, and the alternative understandings that surface. The tools of technology (like those we use in the NWE: the Web, MOO, and e-mail) cut the structural dominance of critique and encourage us to make new pedagogical decisions, like juxtaposing a William Burroughs novel with the founding of the Birmingham School with the rise of the DJ. Putting these practices into the mix, we redefine cultural critique. 1964, then, is the place where cultural mixing begins. References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Harry Zohn trans. London: NLB, 1973. Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1982 (1959). _________________. Nova Express. New York: Grove, 1992 (1964). _________________. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove, 1987 (1962). Burroughs, William S. and Byron Gysin. The Third Mind. New York: Viking Press, 1978. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun. London: Quartet, 1999. Gibson, William. "Burning Chrome." Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1981. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hall, Stuart. "Theoretical Legacies." Cultural Studies. Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel. The Popular Arts. New York: Pantheon, 1964. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1979. Poschardt, Ulf. DJ Culture. London: Quartet, 1998. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Black Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Tosch, Nick. Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. Wolfe, Tom. "The Fifth Beatle." The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby. New York: Pocket Books, 1965.

IntroductionIn the wine world, authenticity is not just desired, it is actively required. That demand comes from a complex of producers, distributors and consumers, and other interested parties. Consequently, the authenticity of wine is constantly created, reworked, presented, performed, argued over, contested and appreciated.At one level, such processes have clear economic elements. A wine deemed to be an authentic “expression” of something—the soil and micro-climate in which it was grown, the environment and culture of the region from which it hails, the genius of the wine-maker who nurtured and brought it into being, the quintessential characteristics of the grape variety it is made from—will likely make much more money than one deemed inauthentic. In wine, as in other spheres, perceived authenticity is a means to garner profits, both economic and symbolic (Beverland).At another level, wine animates a complicated intertwining of human tastes, aesthetics, pleasures and identities. Discussions as to the authenticity, or otherwise, of a wine often involve a search by the discussants for meaning and purpose in their lives (Grahm). To discover and appreciate a wine felt to “speak” profoundly of the place from whence it came possibly involves a sense of superiority over others: I drink “real” wine, while you drink mass-market trash (Bourdieu). It can also create reassuring senses of ontological security: in discovering an authentic wine, expressive of a certain aesthetic and locational purity (Zolberg and Cherbo), I have found a cherishable object which can be reliably traced to one particular place on Earth, therefore possessing integrity, honesty and virtue (Fine). Appreciation of wine’s authenticity licenses the self-perception that I am sophisticated and sensitive (Vannini and Williams). My judgement of the wine is also a judgement upon my own aesthetic capacities (Hennion).In wine drinking, and the production, distribution and marketing processes underpinning it, much is at stake as regards authenticity. The social system of the wine world requires the category of authenticity in order to keep operating. This paper examines how and why this has come to be so. It considers the crafting of authenticity in long-term historical perspective. Demand for authentic wine by drinkers goes back many centuries. Self-conscious performances of authenticity by producers is of more recent provenance, and was elaborated above all in France. French innovations then spread to other parts of Europe and the world. The paper reviews these developments, showing that wine authenticity is constituted by an elaborate complex of environmental, cultural, legal, political and commercial factors. The paper both draws upon the social science literature concerning the construction of authenticity and also points out its limitations as regards understanding wine authenticity.The History of AuthenticityIt is conventional in the social science literature (Peterson, Authenticity) to claim that authenticity as a folk category (Lu and Fine), and actors’ desires for authentic things, are wholly “modern,” being unknown in pre-modern contexts (Cohen). Consideration of wine shows that such a view is historically uninformed. Demands by consumers for ‘authentic’ wine, in the sense that it really came from the location it was sold as being from, can be found in the West well before the 19th century, having ancient roots (Wengrow). In ancient Rome, there was demand by elites for wine that was both really from the location it was billed as being from, and was verifiably of a certain vintage (Robertson and Inglis). More recently, demand has existed in Western Europe for “real” Tokaji (sweet wine from Hungary), Port and Bordeaux wines since at least the 17th century (Marks).Conventional social science (Peterson, Authenticity) is on solider ground when demonstrating how a great deal of social energies goes into constructing people’s perceptions—not just of consumers, but of wine producers and sellers too—that particular wines are somehow authentic expressions of the places where they were made. The creation of perceived authenticity by producers and sales-people has a long historical pedigree, beginning in early modernity.For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wine-makers in Bordeaux could not compete on price grounds with burgeoning Spanish, Portuguese and Italian production areas, so they began to compete with them on the grounds of perceived quality. Multiple small plots were reorganised into much bigger vineyards. The latter were now associated with a chateau in the neighbourhood, giving the wines connotations of aristocratic gravity and dignity (Ulin). Product-makers in other fields have used the assertion of long-standing family lineages as apparent guarantors of tradition and quality in production (Peterson, Authenticity). The early modern Bordelaise did the same, augmenting their wines’ value by calling upon aristocratic accoutrements like chateaux, coats-of-arms, alleged long-term family ownership of vineyards, and suchlike.Such early modern entrepreneurial efforts remain the foundations of the very high prestige and prices associated with elite wine-making in the region today, with Chinese companies and consumers particularly keen on the grand crus of the region. Globalization of the wine world today is strongly rooted in forms of authenticity performance invented several hundred years ago.Enter the StateAnother notable issue is the long-term role that governments and legislation have played, both in the construction and presentation of authenticity to publics, and in attempts to guarantee—through regulative measures and taxation systems—that what is sold really has come from where it purports to be from. The west European State has a long history of being concerned with the fraudulent selling of “fake” wines (Anderson, Norman, and Wittwer). Thus Cosimo III, Medici Grand Duke of Florence, was responsible for an edict of 1716 which drew up legal boundaries for Tuscan wine-producing regions, restricting the use of regional names like Chianti to wine that actually came from there (Duguid).These 18th century Tuscan regulations are the distant ancestors of quality-control rules centred upon the need to guarantee the authenticity of wines from particular geographical regions and sub-regions, which are today now ubiquitous, especially in the European Union (DeSoucey). But more direct progenitors of today’s Geographical Indicators (GIs)—enforced by the GATT international treaties—and Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs)—promulgated and monitored by the EU—are French in origin (Barham). The famous 1855 quality-level classification of Bordeaux vineyards and their wines was the first attempt in the world explicitly to proclaim that the quality of a wine was a direct consequence of its defined place of origin. This move significantly helped to create the later highly influential notion that place of origin is the essence of a wine’s authenticity. This innovation was initially wholly commercial, rather than governmental, being carried out by wine-brokers to promote Bordeaux wines at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was later elaborated by State officials.In Champagne, another luxury wine-producing area, small-scale growers of grapes worried that national and international perceptions of their wine were becoming wholly determined by big brands such as Dom Perignon, which advertised the wine as a luxury product, but made no reference to the grapes, the soil, or the (supposedly) traditional methods of production used by growers (Guy). The latter turned to the idea of “locality,” which implied that the character of the wine was an essential expression of the Champagne region itself—something ignored in brand advertising—and that the soil itself was the marker of locality. The idea of “terroir”—referring to the alleged properties of soil and micro-climate, and their apparent expression in the grapes—was mobilised by one group, smaller growers, against another, the large commercial houses (Guy). The terroir notion was a means of constructing authenticity, and denouncing de-localised, homogenizing inauthenticity, a strategy favouring some types of actors over others. The relatively highly industrialized wine-making process was later represented for public consumption as being consonant with both tradition and nature.The interplay of commerce, government, law, and the presentation of authenticity, also appeared in Burgundy. In that region between WWI and WWII, the wine world was transformed by two new factors: the development of tourism and the rise of an ideology of “regionalism” (Laferté). The latter was invented circa WWI by metropolitan intellectuals who believed that each of the French regions possessed an intrinsic cultural “soul,” particularly expressed through its characteristic forms of food and drink. Previously despised peasant cuisine was reconstructed as culturally worthy and true expression of place. Small-scale artisanal wine production was no longer seen as an embarrassment, producing wines far more “rough” than those of Bordeaux and Champagne. Instead, such production was taken as ground and guarantor of authenticity (Laferté). Location, at regional, village and vineyard level, was taken as the primary quality indicator.For tourists lured to the French regions by the newly-established Guide Michelin, and for influential national and foreign journalists, an array of new promotional devices were created, such as gastronomic festivals and folkloric brotherhoods devoted to celebrations of particular foodstuffs and agricultural events like the wine-harvest (Laferté). The figure of the wine-grower was presented as an exemplary custodian of tradition, relatively free of modern capitalist exchange relations. These are the beginnings of an important facet of later wine companies’ promotional literatures worldwide—the “decoupling” of their supposed commitments to tradition, and their “passion” for wine-making beyond material interests, from everyday contexts of industrial production and profit-motives (Beverland). Yet the work of making the wine-maker and their wines authentically “of the soil” was originally stimulated in response to international wine markets and the tourist industry (Laferté).Against this background, in 1935 the French government enacted legislation which created theInstitut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) and its Appelation d’Origine Controlle (AOC) system (Barham). Its goal was, and is, to protect what it defines as terroir, encompassing both natural and human elements. This legislation went well beyond previous laws, as it did more than indicate that wine must be honestly labelled as deriving from a given place of origin, for it included guarantees of authenticity too. An authentic wine was defined as one which truly “expresses” the terroir from which it comes, where terroir means both soil and micro-climate (nature) and wine-making techniques “traditionally” associated with that area. Thus French law came to enshrine a relatively recently invented cultural assumption: that places create distinctive tastes, the value of this state of affairs requiring strong State protection. Terroir must be protected from the untrammelled free market. Land and wine, symbiotically connected, are de-commodified (Kopytoff). Wine is embedded in land; land is embedded in what is regarded as regional culture; the latter is embedded in national history (Polanyi).But in line with the fact that the cultural underpinnings of the INAO/AOC system were strongly commercially oriented, at a more subterranean level the de-commodified product also has economic value added to it. A wine worthy of AOC protection must, it is assumed, be special relative to wines un-deserving of that classification. The wine is taken out of the market, attributed special status, and released, economically enhanced, back onto the market. Consequently, State-guaranteed forms of authenticity embody ambivalent but ultimately efficacious economic processes. Wine pioneered this Janus-faced situation, the AOC system in the 1990s being generalized to all types of agricultural product in France. A huge bureaucratic apparatus underpins and makes possible the AOC system. For a region and product to gain AOC protection, much energy is expended by collectives of producers and other interested parties like regional development and tourism officials. The French State employs a wide range of expert—oenological, anthropological, climatological, etc.—who police the AOC classificatory mechanisms (Barham).Terroirisation ProcessesFrench forms of legal classification, and the broader cultural classifications which underpin them and generated them, very much influenced the EU’s PDO system. The latter uses a language of authenticity rooted in place first developed in France (DeSoucey). The French model has been generalized, both from wine to other foodstuffs, and around many parts of Europe and the world. An Old World idea has spread to the New World—paradoxically so, because it was the perceived threat posed by the ‘placeless’ wines and decontextualized grapes of the New World which stimulated much of the European legislative measures to protect terroir (Marks).Paxson shows how artisanal cheese-makers in the US, appropriate the idea of terroir to represent places of production, and by extension the cheeses made there, that have no prior history of being constructed as terroir areas. Here terroir is invented at the same time as it is naturalised, made to seem as if it simply points to how physical place is directly expressed in a manufactured product. By defining wine or cheese as a natural product, claims to authenticity are themselves naturalised (Ulin). Successful terroirisation brings commercial benefits for those who engage in it, creating brand distinctiveness (no-one else can claim their product expresses that particularlocation), a value-enhancing aura around the product which, and promotion of food tourism (Murray and Overton).Terroirisation can also render producers into virtuous custodians of the land who are opposed to the depredations of the industrial food and agriculture systems, the categories associated with terroir classifying the world through a binary opposition: traditional, small-scale production on the virtuous side, and large-scale, “modern” harvesting methods on the other. Such a situation has prompted large-scale, industrial wine-makers to adopt marketing imagery that implies the “place-based” nature of their offerings, even when the grapes can come from radically different areas within a region or from other regions (Smith Maguire). Like smaller producers, large companies also decouple the advertised imagery of terroir from the mundane realities of industry and profit-margins (Beverland).The global transportability of the terroir concept—ironic, given the rhetorical stress on the uniqueness of place—depends on its flexibility and ambiguity. In the French context before WWII, the phrase referred specifically to soil and micro-climate of vineyards. Slowly it started mean to a markedly wider symbolic complex involving persons and personalities, techniques and knowhow, traditions, community, and expressions of local and regional heritage (Smith Maguire). Over the course of the 20th century, terroir became an ever broader concept “encompassing the physical characteristics of the land (its soil, climate, topography) and its human dimensions (culture, history, technology)” (Overton 753). It is thought to be both natural and cultural, both physical and human, the potentially contradictory ramifications of such understanding necessitating subtle distinctions to ward off confusion or paradox. Thus human intervention on the land and the vines is often represented as simply “letting the grapes speak for themselves” and “allowing the land to express itself,” as if the wine-maker were midwife rather than fabricator. Terroir talk operates with an awkward verbal balancing act: wine-makers’ “signature” styles are expressions of their cultural authenticity (e.g. using what are claimed as ‘traditional’ methods), yet their stylistic capacities do not interfere with the soil and micro-climate’s natural tendencies (i.e. the terroir’sphysical authenticity).The wine-making process is a case par excellence of a network of humans and objects, or human and non-human actants (Latour). The concept of terroir today both acknowledges that fact, but occludes it at the same time. It glosses over the highly problematic nature of what is “real,” “true,” “natural.” The roles of human agents and technologies are sequestered, ignoring the inevitably changing nature of knowledges and technologies over time, recognition of which jeopardises claims about an unchanging physical, social and technical order. Harvesting by machine production is representationally disavowed, yet often pragmatically embraced. The role of “foreign” experts acting as advisors —so-called “flying wine-makers,” often from New World production cultures —has to be treated gingerly or covered up. Because of the effects of climate change on micro-climates and growing conditions, the taste of wines from a particular terroir changes over time, but the terroir imaginary cannot recognise that, being based on projections of timelessness (Brabazon).The authenticity referred to, and constructed, by terroir imagery must constantly be performed to diverse audiences, convincing them that time stands still in the terroir. If consumers are to continue perceiving authenticity in a wine or winery, then a wide range of cultural intermediaries—critics, journalists and other self-proclaiming experts must continue telling convincing stories about provenance. Effective authenticity story-telling rests on the perceived sincerity and knowledgeability of the teller. Such tales stress romantic imagery and colourful, highly personalised accounts of the quirks of particular wine-makers, omitting mundane details of production and commercial activities (Smith Maguire). Such intermediaries must seek to interest their audience in undiscovered regions and “quirky” styles, demonstrating their insider knowledge. But once such regions and styles start to become more well-known, their rarity value is lost, and intermediaries must find ever newer forms of authenticity, which in turn will lose their burnished aura when they become objects of mundane consumption. An endless cycle of discovering and undermining authenticity is constantly enacted.ConclusionAuthenticity is a category held by different sorts of actors in the wine world, and is the means by which that world is held together. This situation has developed over a long time-frame and is now globalized. Yet I will end this paper on a volte face. Authenticity in the wine world can never be regarded as wholly and simply a social construction. One cannot directly import into the analysis of that world assumptions—about the wholly socially constructed nature of phenomena—which social scientific studies of other domains, most notably culture industries, work with (Peterson, Authenticity). Ways of thinking which are indeed useful for understanding the construction of authenticity in some specific contexts, cannot just be applied in simplistic manners to the wine world. When they are applied in direct and unsophisticated ways, such an operation misses the specificities and particularities of wine-making processes. These are always simultaneously “social” and “natural”, involving multiple forms of complex intertwining of human actions, environmental and climatological conditions, and the characteristics of the vines themselves—a situation markedly beyond beyond any straightforward notion of “social construction.”The wine world has many socially constructed objects. But wine is not just like any other product. Its authenticity cannot be fabricated in the manner of, say, country music (Peterson, Country). Wine is never in itself only a social construction, nor is its authenticity, because the taste, texture and chemical elements of wine derive from complex human interactions with the physical environment. Wine is partly about packaging, branding and advertising—phenomena standard social science accounts of authenticity focus on—but its organic properties are irreducible to those factors. Terroir is an invention, a label put on to certain things, meaning they are perceived to be authentic. But the things that label refers to—ranging from the slope of a vineyard and the play of sunshine on it, to how grapes grow and when they are picked—are entwined with human semiotics but not completely created by them. A truly comprehensive account of wine authenticity remains to be written.ReferencesAnderson, Kym, David Norman, and Glyn Wittwer. “Globalization and the World’s Wine Markets: Overview.” Discussion Paper No. 0143, Centre for International Economic Studies. Adelaide: U of Adelaide, 2001.Barham, Elizabeth. “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labelling.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003): 127–38.Beverland, Michael B. “Crafting Brand Authenticity: The Case of Luxury Wines.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1003–29.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1992.Brabazon, Tara. “Colonial Control or Terroir Tourism? The Case of Houghton’s White Burgundy.” Human Geographies 8.2 (2014): 17–33.Cohen, Erik. “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 15.3 (1988): 371–86.DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review 75.3 (2010): 432–55.Duguid, Paul. “Developing the Brand: The Case of Alcohol, 1800–1880.” Enterprise and Society 4.3 (2003): 405–41.Fine, Gary A. “Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art.” Theory and Society 32.2 (2003): 153–80.Grahm, Randall. “The Soul of Wine: Digging for Meaning.” Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. Ed. Fritz Allhoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 219–24.Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Hennion, Antoine. “The Things That Bind Us Together.”Cultural Sociology 1.1 (2007): 65–85.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 64–91.Laferté, Gilles. “End or Invention of Terroirs? Regionalism in the Marketing of French Luxury Goods: The Example of Burgundy Wines in the Inter-War Years.” Working Paper, Centre d’Economie et Sociologie Appliquées a l’Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux, Dijon.Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1993.Lu, Shun and Gary A. Fine. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment.” The Sociological Quarterly 36.3 (1995): 535–53.Marks, Denton. “Competitiveness and the Market for Central and Eastern European Wines: A Cultural Good in the Global Wine Market.” Journal of Wine Research 22.3 (2011): 245–63.Murray, Warwick E. and John Overton. “Defining Regions: The Making of Places in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Australian Geographer 42.4 (2011): 419–33.Overton, John. “The Consumption of Space: Land, Capital and Place in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Geoforum 41.5 (2010): 752–62.Paxson, Heather. “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes.” American Anthropologist 112.3 (2010): 444–57.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.———. “In Search of Authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1083–98.Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.Robertson, Roland, and David Inglis. “The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness.” Globalizations 1.1 (2006): 72–92.Smith Maguire, Jennifer. “Provenance and the Liminality of Production and Consumption: The Case of Wine Promoters.” Marketing Theory 10.3 (2010): 269–82.Trubek, Amy. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2008.Ulin, Robert C. “Invention and Representation as Cultural Capital.” American Anthropologist 97.3 (1995): 519–27.Vannini, Phillip, and Patrick J. Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.Wengrow, David. “Prehistories of Commodity Branding.” Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 7–34.Zolberg, Vera and Joni Maya Cherbo. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

IntroductionAs both a historical and cultural entity, the city of New Orleans has long-maintained a reputation as a centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures. Historically, images of mardi gras, jazz, and parties on the shores of the Mississippi have pervaded the cultural vision of the city as a “mecca” for “social life” (Marina 2), and successfully fed its tourism narratives. Simultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the historical folds of the city’s urban mythology. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. This has produced, in turn, its own brand of vampire tourism (Murphy 2015). Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire hub. Taking this idea as a point of departure, this article provides culturally- and historically-informed critical considerations of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’, especially as portrayed in The Originals (2013-2017), a contemporary television series where vampires are the main protagonists. In the series, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with – and are, at times, almost inseparable from – the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms.The critical connection between urban narratives and vampires representation, as far as New Orleans is concerned, is profoundly entangled with notions of both tourism and fictionalised popular accounts of folklore (Piatti-Farnell 172). In approaching the conceptual relationship between New Orleans as a cultural and historical entity and the vampire — in its folkloristic and imaginative context — the analysis will take a three-pronged approach: firstly, it will consider the historical narrative of tourism for the city of New Orleans; secondly, the city’s connection to vampires and other Gothicised entities will be considered, both historically and narratively; and finally, the analysis will focus on how the connection between New Orleans and Gothic folklore of the vampire is represented in The Originals, with the issue of cultural authenticity being brought into the foreground. A critical footnote must be given to the understanding of the term ‘New Orleans’ in this article as meaning primarily the French Quarter – or, the Vieux Carre – and its various representations. This geographical focus principally owes its existence to the profound cultural significance that the French Quarter has occupied in the history of New Orleans as a city, and, in particular, in its connection to narratives of magic and Gothic folklore, as well as the broader historical and contemporary tourism structures. A History of TourismSocial historian Kevin Fox Gotham agues that New Orleans as a city has been particularly successful in fabricating a sellable image of itself; tourism, Gotham reminds us, is about “the production of local difference, local cultures, and different local histories that appeal to visitors’ tastes for the exotic and the unique” (“Gentrification” 1100). In these terms, both the history and the socio-cultural ‘feel’ of the city cannot be separated from the visual constructs that accompany it. Over the decades, New Orleans has fabricated a distinct network of representational patterns for the Vieux Carre in particular, where the deployment of specific images, themes and motifs – which are, in truth, only peripherally tied to the city’ actual social and political history, and owe their creation and realisation more to the success of fictional narratives from film and literature – is employed to “stimulate tourist demands to buy and consume” (Gotham, “Gentrification” 1102). This image of the city as hedonistic site is well-acknowledged, has to be understood, at least partially, as a conscious construct aimed at the production an identity for itself, which the city can in turn sell to visitors, both domestically and internationally. New Orleans, Gotham suggests, is a ‘complex and constantly mutating city’, in which “meanings of place and community” are “inexorably intertwined with tourism” (Authentic 5). The view of New Orleans as a site of hedonistic pleasure is something that has been heavily capitalised upon by the tourism industry of the city for decades, if not centuries. A keen look at advertising pamphlets for the city, dating form the late Nineteenth century onwards, provides an overview of thematic selling points, that primarily focus on notions of jazz, endless parties and, in particular, nostalgic and distinctly rose-tinted views of the Old South and its glorious plantations (Thomas 7). The decadent view of New Orleans as a centre of carnal pleasures has often been recalled by scholars and lay observers alike; this vision of he city indeed holds deep historical roots, and is entangled with the city’s own economic structures, as well as its acculturated tourism ones. In the late 19th and early 20th century one of the things that New Orleans was very famous for was actually Storyville, the city’s red-light district, sanctioned in 1897 by municipal ordinance. Storyville quickly became a centralized attraction in the heart of New Orleans, so much so that it began being heavily advertised, especially through the publication of the ‘Blue Book’, a resource created for tourists. The Blue Book contained, in alphabetical order, information on all the prostitutes of Storyville. Storyville remained very popular and the most famous attraction in New Orleans until its demolition in 1919 Anthony Stanonis suggests that, in its ability to promote a sellable image for the city, “Storyville meshed with the intersts of business men in the age before mass tourism” (105).Even after the disappearance of Storyville, New Orleans continued to foster its image a site of hedonism, a narrative aided by a favourable administration, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The French Quarter, in particular, “became a tawdry mélange of brothers and gambling dens operating with impunity under lax law enforcement” (Souther 16). The image of the city as a site for pleasures of worldly nature continued to be deeply rooted, and even survives in the following decades today, as visible in the numerous exotic dance parlours located on the famous Bourbon Street.Vampire TourismSimultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the recent historical folds of the city’s urban mythology, where vampires, magic, and voodoo are an unavoidable presence. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. Kenneth Holditch contends that ‘”New Orleans is a city in love with its myths, mysteries and fantasies” (quoted in McKinney 8). In the contemporary era, these qualities are profoundly reflected in the city’s urban tourism image, where the vampire narrative is pushed into the foreground. When in the city, one might be lucky enough to take one of the many ‘vampire tours’ — often coupled with narratives of haunted locations — or visit the vampire bookshop, or even take part in the annual vampire ball. Indeed, the presence of vampires in New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative is so pervasive that one might be tempted to assume that it has always occupied a prominent place in the city’s cultural fabric. Nonetheless, this perception is not accurate: the historical evidence from tourism pamphlets for the city do not make any mentions of vampire tourism before the 1990s, and even then, the focus on the occult side of new Orleans tended to privilege stories of voodoo and hoodoo — a presence that still survives strongly in the cultural narrative city itself (Murphy 91). While the connection between vampires and New Orleans is a undoubtedly recent one, the development and establishment of New Orleans as vampire city cannot be thought of as a straight line. A number of cultural and historical currents appear to converge in the creation of the city’s vampire mystique. The history and geography of the city here could be an important factor, and a useful starting point; as the site of extreme immigration and ethnic and racial mingling New Orleans holds a reputation for mystery. The city was, of course, the regrettable site of a huge marketplace for the slave trade, so discussions of political economy could also be important here, although I’ll leave them for another time. As a city, New Orleans has often been described – by novelists, poets, and historians alike – as being somewhat ‘peculiar’. Simone de Behaviour was known to have remarked that that the city is surrounded by a “pearl grey” and ‘luminous’ air” (McKinney 1). In similar fashion, Oliver Evans claims the city carries “opalescent hints” (quoted in McKinney 1). New Orleans is famous for having a quite thick mist, the result of a high humidity levels in the air. To an observing eye, New Orleans seems immersed in an almost otherworldly ‘glow’, which bestows upon its limits an ethereal and mysterious quality (Piatti-Farnell 173). While this intention here is not to suggest that New Orleans is the only city to have mist – especially in the Southern States – one might venture to say that this physical phenomenon, joined with other occurrences and legends, has certainly contributed to the city’s Gothicised image. The geography of the city also makes it sadly famous for floods and their subsequent devastation, which over centuries have wrecked parts of the city irrevocably. New Orleans sits at a less than desirable geographical position, is no more than 17 feet above sea level, and much of it is at least five feet below (McKinney 5). In spite of its lamentable fame, hurricane Katrina was not the first devastating geo-meteorological phenomenon to hit and destroy most of New Orleans; one can trace similar hurricane occurrences in 1812 and 1915, which at the time significantly damaged parts of the French Quarter. The geographical position of New Orleans also owes to the city’s well-known history of disease such as the plague and tuberculosis – often associated, in previous centuries, with the miasma proper to reclaimed river lands. In similar terms, one must not forget New Orleans’s history of devastating fires – primarily in the years 1788, 1794, 1816, 1866 and 1919 – which slowly destroyed the main historical parts of the city, particularly in the Vieux Carre, and to some extent opened the way for regeneration and later gentrification as well. As a result of its troubled and destructive history, Louise McKinnon claims that the city ‒ perhaps unlike any others in the United States ‒ hinges on perpetual cycles of destruction and regeneration, continuously showing “the wear and tear of human life” (McKinney 6).It is indeed in this extremely important element that New Orleans finds a conceptual source in its connection to notions of the undead, and the vampire in particular. Historically, one can identify the pervasive use of Gothic terminology to describe New Orleans, even if, the descriptions themselves were more attuned to perceptions of the city’s architecture and metrological conditions, rather than the recollection of any folklore-inspired narratives of unread creatures. Because of its mutating, and often ill-maintained historical architecture – especially in the French Quarter - New Orleans has steadily maintained a reputation as a city of “splendid decay” (McKinney, 6). This highly lyrical and metaphorical approach plays an important part in building the city as a site of mystery and enchantment. Its decaying outlook functions as an unavoidable sign of how New Orleans continues to absorb, and simultaneously repel, as McKinney puts it, “the effects of its own history” (6).Nonetheless, the history of New Orleans as a cultural entity, especially in terms of tourism, has not been tied to vampires for centuries, as many imagine, and the city itself insists in its contemporary tourism narratives. Although a lot of folklore has survived around the city in connection to magic and mysticism, for a number of reasons, vampires have not always been in the foreground of its publicised cultural narratives. Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire spot: most scholars claim that it all started with the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), but actually evidence shows that the vampire narrative for the city of New Orleans did not fully explode until the release of Neil Jordan’s cinematic adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (1994). This film really put New Orleans at the centre of the vampire narrative, indulging in the use of many iconic locations in the city as tied to vampire, and cementing the idea of New Orleans as a vampiric city (Piatti-Farnell 175). The impact of Rice’s work, and its adaptations, has also been picked up by numerous other examples of popular culture, including Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire mystery series, and its well-known television adaptation True Blood. Harris herself states in one of her novels: “New Orleans had been the place to go for vampires and those who wanted to be around them ever since Anne Rice had been proven right about their existence” (2). In spite of the fact that popular culture, rather than actual historical evidence, lies at the heart of the city’s cultural relationship with vampires, this does not detract from the fact that vampires themselves – as fabricated figures lying somewhere between folklore, history, and fiction – represent an influential part of New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative, building a bridge between historical storytelling, mythologised identities, and consumerism. The Originals: Vampires in the CityIndeed, the impact of popular culture in establishing and re-establishing the success of the vampire tourism narrative in New Orleans is undeniable. Contemporary examples continue to capitalise on the visual, cultural, and suggestively historical connection between the city’s landmarks and vampire tales, cementing the notion of New Orleans as a solid entity within the Gothic tourism narrative. One such successful example is The Originals. This television show is actually a spin-off of the Vampires Diaries, and begins with three vampires, the Mikaelson siblings (Niklaus, Elijah, and Rebekkah) returning to the city of New Orleans for the first time since 1919, when they were forced to flee by their vengeful father. In their absence, Niklaus's protégé, Marcel, took charge of the city. The storyline of The Originals focuses on battles within the vampire factions to regain control of the city, and eliminate the hold of other mystical creatures such as werewolves and witches (Anyiwo 175). The central narrative here is that the city belongs to the vampire, and there can be no other real Gothic presence in the Quarter. One can only wonder, even at this embryonic level, how this connects functions in a multifaceted way, extending the critique of the vampire’s relationship to New Orleans from the textual dimension of the TV show to the real life cultural narrative of the city itself. A large number of the narrative strands in The Originals are tied to city and its festivals, its celebrations, and its visions of the past, whether historically recorded, or living in the pages of its Gothic folklore. Vampires are actually claimed to have made New Orleans what it is today, and they undoubtedly rule it. As Marcel puts it: “The blood never stops flowing, and the party never ends” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). Even the vampiric mantra for New Orleans in The Originals is tied to the city’s existing and long-standing tourism narrative, as “the party never ends” is a reference to one of Bourbon Street’s famous slogans. Indeed, the pictorial influence of the city’s primary landmarks in The Originals is undeniable. In spite of the fact the inside scenes for The Originals were filmed in a studio, the outside shots in the series reveal a strong connections to the city itself, as viewers are left with no doubt as to the show’s setting. New Orleans is continuously mentioned and put on show – and pervasively referred to as “our city”, by the vampires. So much so, that New Orleans becomes the centre of the feud between supernatural forces, as the vampires fight witches and werewolves – among others- to maintain control over the city’s historical heart. The French Quarter, in particular, is given renewed life from the ashes of history into the beating heart of the vampire narrative, so much so that it almost becomes its own character in its own right, instrumental in constructing the vampire mystique. The impact of the vampire on constructing an image for the city of New Orleans is made explicit in The Originals, as the series explicitly shows vampires at the centre of the city’s history. Indeed, the show’s narrative goes as far as justifying the French Quarter’s history and even legends through the vampire metaphor. For instance, the series explains the devastating fire that destroyed the French Opera House in 1919 as the result of a Mikaelson vampire family feud. In similar terms, the vampires of the French Quarter are shown at the heart of the Casquette Girls narrative, a well-known tale from Eighteenth-century colonial New Orleans, where young women were shipped from France to the new Louisiana colony, in order to marry. The young women were said to bring small chests – or casquettes – containing their clothes (Crandle 47). The Originals, however, capitalises on the folkloristic interpretation that perceives the girls’ luggage as coffins potentially containing the undead, a popular version of the tale that can often be heard if taking part in one of the many vampire tours in New Orleans. One can see here how the chronicles of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the presumed narratives of the vampire in the city merge to become one and the same, blurring the lines between history and fiction, and presenting the notion of folklore as a verifiable entity of the everyday (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 25) It is essential to remember, en passant, that, as far as giving the undead their own historical chronicles in connection to New Orleans, The Originals is not alone in doing this. Other TV series like American Horror Story have provided Gothicised histories for the city, although in this case more connected to witchcraft, hoodoo, and voodoo, rather than vampires.What one can see taking place in The Originals is a form of alternate and revisionist history that is reminiscent of several instances of pulp and science fiction from the early 20th century, where the Gothic element lies at the centre of not only the fictional narrative, but also of the re-conceptualisation of historical time and space, as not absolute entities, but as narratives open to interpretation (Singles 103). The re-interpretation here is of course connected to the cultural anxieties that are intrinsic to the Gothic – of changes, shifts, and unwanted returns - and the vampire as a figure of intersections, signalling the shift between stages of existence. If it is true that, to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur’s famous contention, the past returns to “haunt” us (105), then the history of New Orleans in The Originals is both established and haunted by vampires, a pervasive shadow that provides the city itself with an almost tangible Gothic afterlife. This connection, of course, extends beyond the fictional world of the television series, and finds fertile ground in the cultural narratives that the city constructs for itself. The tourism narrative of New Orleans also lies at the heart of the reconstructive historical imagination, which purposefully re-invents the city as a constructed entity that is, in itself, extremely sellable. The Originals mentions on multiple occasions that certain bars — owned, of course, by vampires — host regular ‘vampire themed events’, to “keep the tourists happy”. The importance of maintaining a steady influx of vampire tourism into the Quarter is made very clear throughout, and the vampires are complicit in fostering it for a number of reasons: not only because it provides them and the city with a constant revenue, but also because it brings a continuous source of fresh blood for the vampires to feed on. As Marcel puts it: “Something's gotta draw in the out-of-towners. Otherwise we'd all go hungry” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). New Orleans, it is made clear, is not only portrayed as a vampire hub, but also as a hot spot for vampire tourism; as part of the tourism narratives, the vampires themselves — who commonly feign humanity — actually further ‘pretend’ to be vampires for the tourists, who expect to find vampires in the city. It is made clear in The Originals that vampires often put on a show – and bear in mind, these are vampires who pretend to be human, who pretend to be vampires for the tourists. They channel stereotypes that belong in Gothic novels and films, and that are, as far as the ‘real’ vampires of the series, are concerned, mostly fictional. The vampires that are presented to the tourists in The Originals are, inevitably, inauthentic, for the real vampires themselves purposefully portray the vision of vampires put forward by popular culture, together with its own motifs and stereotypes. The vampires happily perform their popular culture role, in order to meet the expectations of the tourist. This interaction — which sociologist Dean MacCannell would refer to, when discussing the dynamics of tourism, as “staged authenticity” (591) — is the basis of the appeal, and what continues to bring tourists back, generating profits for vampires and humans alike. Nina Auerbach has persuasively argued that the vampire is often eroticised through its connections to the “self-obsessed’ glamour of consumerism that ‘subordinates history to seductive object” (57).With the issue of authenticity brought into sharp relief, The Originals also foregrounds questions of authenticity in relation to New Orleans’s own vampire tourism narrative, which ostensibly bases into historical narratives of magic, horror, and folklore, and constructs a fictionalised urban tale, suitable to the tourism trade. The vampires of the French Quarter in The Originals act as the embodiment of the constructed image of New Orleans as the epitome of a vampire tourist destination. ConclusionThere is a clear suggestion in The Originals that vampires have evolved from simple creatures of old folklore, to ‘products’ that can be sold to expectant tourists. This evolution, as far as popular culture is concerned, is also inevitably tied to the conceptualisation of certain locations as ‘vampiric’, a notion that, in the contemporary era, hinges on intersecting narratives of culture, history, and identity. Within this, New Orleans has successfully constructed an image for itself as a vampire city, exploiting, in a number ways, the popular and purposefully historicised connection to the undead. In both tourism narratives and popular culture, of which The Originals is an ideal example, New Orleans’s urban image — often sited in constructions and re-constructions, re-birth and decay — is presented as a result of the vampire’s own existence, and thrives in the Gothicised afterlife of imagery, symbolism, and cultural persuasion. In these terms, the ‘inauthentic’ vampires of The Originals are an ideal allegory that provides a channelling ground for the issues surrounding the ‘inauthentic’ state of New Orleans a sellable tourism entity. 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