Academic literature on the topic 'Cape Elizabeth Formation'

The Casco Bay Group in south-central Maine consists of a sequence of Late Cambrian to Early Ordovician interlayered quartzofeldspathic granofels and pelite (Cape Elizabeth Formation) overlain by Early to Late Ordovician back-arc volcanic (Spring Point Formation) and volcanogenic sedimentary rocks (Diamond Island and Scarboro formations). These rocks were tightly folded and subjected to low-pressure amphibolite-facies metamorphism in the Late Silurian. This phase of deformation and metamorphism was followed by the development of a variety of structures consistent with a period of dextral transpression in Middle Devonian – Early Carboniferous time. Previously dated plutons within the sequence range in age from 422–389 Ma and record a period of prolonged intrusive activity in the region. Similarities in age, volcanic rock geochemistry, and lithologic characteristics argue strongly for a correlation between rocks of the Casco Bay Group and those in the Miramichi belt of eastern Maine and northern New Brunswick. The Cape Elizabeth Formation correlates with Late Cambrian to Early Ordovician sediments of the Miramichi Group (Gander Zone) and the Spring Point through Scarboro formations correlate with Early to Late Ordovician back-arc basin volcanics and volcanogenic sediments of the Bathurst Supergroup. The folding and low-pressure metamorphism of the Casco Bay Group is attributed to Late Silurian to Early Devonian terrane convergence and possible lithospheric delamination that would have resulted in a prolonged period of intrusive activity and elevated temperatures at low pressures. Continued convergence and likely plate reconfigurations in the Middle Devonian to Carboniferous led to widespread dextral transpression in the region.

ABSTRACTScholars have long known of the proposed marriage in 1630 of John Dryden, grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, and Elizabeth Isham, eldest child of Sir John Isham. All knowledge of this proposed marriage came from correspondence revealing that, having reached a financial impasse, the two families aborted the proposed match. At first glance, such a case seems rather unremarkable, since similar stories abound of other contemporary families and in more detail. The Dryden–Isham match, however, takes on increased importance with the recent discovery of Elizabeth Isham's 60,000-word spiritual autobiography. Unlike the correspondence that mainly deals with the economic aspects of the match, Elizabeth's autobiography provides a more personal and emotional account, revealing the importance that familial love and honour played in the arrangement. In addition, the autobiography shows that the failed match caused Elizabeth to have a religious aversion to marriage, leading her to choose singlehood for the remainder of her life. Her experience forces scholars to recognize the significance that familial love, honour, and personal piety could have on marriage formation in the seventeenth century, and it illustrates the lasting impact that a failed match could have on a woman in early modern England.

Abstract. The Agulhas leakage to the South Atlantic exhibits a strong anti-correlation with the mass flux of the Agulhas Current. When the Agulhas retroflection is in its normal position near Cape Agulhas, leakage is relatively high and the nearby South African coastal slant (angle of derivation from zonal) is very small and relatively invariant alongshore. During periods of strong incoming flux (low leakage), the retroflection shifts upstream to Port Elizabeth or East London, where the coastline shape has a "kink", i.e., the slant changes abruptly from small on the west side, to large (about 55°) on the east side. Here, we show that the variability of rings shedding and anti-correlation between Agulhas mass flux and leakage to the South Atlantic may be attributed to this kink. To do so, we develop a nonlinear analytical model for retroflection near a coastline that consists of two sections, a zonal western section and a strongly slanted eastern section. The principal difference between this and the model of a straight slanted coast (discussed in our earlier papers) is that, here, free purely westward propagation of eddies along the zonal coastline section is allowed. This introduces an interesting situation in which strong slant of the coast east of the kink prohibits the formation and shedding of rings, while the almost zonal coastal orientation west of the kink encourages shedding. Therefore, the kink "locks" the position of the retroflection, forcing it to occur just downstream of the kink. Rings are necessarily shed from the retroflection area in our kinked model, regardless of the degree of eastern coast slant. In contrast, a no-kink model with a coastline of intermediate slant indicates that shedding is almost completely arrested by that slant. We suggest that the observed difference in ring-shedding intensity during times of normal retroflection position and times when the retroflection is shifted eastward is due to the change in the retroflection location with respect to the kink. When the incoming flux detaches from the coast north of the kink, ring transport is small; when the flux detaches south of the kink, transport is large. Simple process-oriented numerical simulations are in fair agreement with our analytical results.

Abstract. The Agulhas leakage to the South Atlantic (SA) exhibits strong anti-correlations with the mass flux of the Agulhas Current. This is accompanied by the migration of the Agulhas retroflection whose normal position (NPR) is near Cape Agulhas, where the slant of the South African coast is very small. During periods of strong incoming flux (SIF), the retroflection shifts upstream to Port Elizabeth or East London, where the coastline shape has a "kink", i.e., the slant changes abruptly from small on the west side, to large (about 55°) on the east side. Here, we show that the variability of rings shedding maybe attributed to this kink. To do so, we develop a nonlinear analytical model for retroflection near a coastline that consists of two sections, one strongly slanted (corresponding to the east side) and the other zonal (corresponding to the west side). The principal difference between this and the model of a single straight slanted coast discussed in our earlier papers is that a free purely westward propagation of eddies along the zonal coastline section is allowed in the kinked case. This introduces the interesting situation where the strong slant of the coast east of the kink prohibits the formation and shedding of rings whereas the coast west of the kink encourages such shedding. Therefore, the kink model "locks" the position of the retroflection forcing it to occur just downstream of the kink. That is, rings are necessarily shed from the retroflection area in our kinked model, regardless of the eastern coast slant. By contrast, the application of "no-kink" model for an "averaged" slant (at the same point as the kink) leads to the conclusion that shedding is almost completely arrested by the slant. We suggest that the difference between the intensities of rings shedding during NPR and SIF is due to the shift in the zero curl line in respect to the kink. When the zero curl intersects the coast north of the kink the transport is small but it is large when the zero curl is situated south of the kink. Simple process-oriented numerical simulations are in fair agreement with our results.

By the time Elizabeth Tudor came to power, proclaimed in 1558, Queen of England and Ireland, the state was going through a difficult period, which was characterized by a whole complex of internal and external socio-economic problems. Partly forced by these circumstances, Elizabeth engaged in reforming the economic system and the economy of the country, creating a powerful administrative and financial apparatus that met the urgent needs of the government, which ultimately led to irreversible social changes in the country. Parliament, in turn, sought to strengthen its role in public Affairs against the will of Elizabeth. In the face of this confrontation, the absolute monarchy in England began to develop in its own way, different from the continental experience, which contributed to the formation of the socio-economic and political foundations of the future British Empire.

In this article, I will apply the varieties of secularism theory developed by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Ahmet Kuru in the case of Indonesia. Following Kuru�s typology, I argue that Indonesian secularism resembles that of passive secularism. This form of secularism came about from an alliance between secular nationalists and a religious minority (Christianity). The alliance between the two groups had successfully prevented Islam from becoming a dominant religion when an independent Indonesian state was formed in 1945. It was also successful from preventing reformist Muslims from instituting a state based on the sharia law during the crucial period of state-building in Indonesia between 1945 and 1960. However, this alliance also results in the formation of two authoritarian regimes that ruled Indonesia for four decades (1959-1998), and in the often tenuous relationship between two religious groups that sat on the opposite end of this conflict, namely Indonesian Muslims and Christians.

The article deals with the perception of the British Ambassador Ed. Finch of one of a series of palace coups of the 18th century, which took place in November 1741, as a result of which the daughter of Peter I — Elizabeth Petrovna came to power. Russian historians in their studies of palace coups relied on a solid source base. Meanwhile, the diplomatic correspondence with the Secretaries of State of the residents at the court of the empresses remained the least studied by them. The author of the article fills in this gap and highlights the palace coup in favor of Elizabeth Petrovna, relying on diplomatic correspondence of the British Ambassador Edward Finch. Finch dwelt on the description of the coup, drawing attention to its preparation and the decisive role in the events of the representatives of France — the Marquis de Chetardi and the life physician Elizabeth Petrovna — Lestocq. The appeal to the diplomatic correspondence of the ambassador with the Secretary of State, previously used in Russian historiography only in fragments, allowed us to learn many details of the events related to the palace coup, as well as the first steps of the government of Elizabeth Petrovna (formation of the Cabinet, the work of the investigative commission on former officials, prosecution and punishment of the accused, etc.). The Empress's obvious sympathy for certain representatives of France, who provided her with effective assistance in organizing and implementing the coup, could not but affect the reorientation of the course of Russia's foreign policy, from pro-English to pro-French. The testimonies of the British ambassador, distinguished for the most part by objectivity, allow us to expand the ideas of our contemporaries about one of the interesting and dramatic pages in the history of the palace coup of 1741.

The essence of opposition of the Ukrainian church elite to the Russian centralism of the Synodal period (1721-1786) and analyzes its role in defending the rights and interests of the Orthodox Church are described in the article. The formation of Synod in 1721 opened in a new period in the history of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire, and in Ukraine in particular. The task of this institution, established on the European model, was to unify church life and to offset its local features according to the program outlined by the Spiritual Regulation at the behest of Peter I. The activities of Synod came into sharp contradiction with the privileges of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which it continued to enjoy from the time of its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate. The Metropolitan of Kyiv was deprived of its decisive status, and its superiors - the title of Metropolitan and the right of free election. The restoration of these rights became the main task for the Ukrainian church elite. Under the reign of Empress Anna Ioanivna, the clergy made a major effort to restore the economic rights of the Church, undermined by the release of Hetman Danylo Apostol in 1728, which, however, were fruitless. The reign of Empress Elizabeth began a new era in the autonomous aspirations of the Ukrainian church elite. In response to the petition of Kyiv Bishop Rafail Zaborovskyi, the Metropolitanate of Kyiv was returned to its former status, and ts head - the title of Metropolitan. At the same time, the attempts to restitute the clergy property rights, as so as the restoration of the jurisdiction of the Kyiv Metropolitanate were unsuccessful. The reign of Catherine II, whose main purpose was the complete centralization in all spheres of the Russian Empire and the secularization of church property, became the most difficult and acute period of confrontation with the Russian imperial regime. The Ukrainian church elite, headed by Metropolitan of Kyiv Arsenii Mohylianskyi, tried to use the preparation of the New Code Commission to assert its rights. This has been proven by petitions to restore the status of the Kyiv Metropolitanate and clergy rights. However, the Commission did not complete its activities and the relicts of the autonomy of the Ukrainian elites were finally buried.

Introduction In the elite space of Haute Couture, fashion is presented through a theatrical array of dynamics—the engagement of specific bodies performing for select audiences in highly curated spaces. Each element is both very precise in its objectives and carefully selected for impact. In this way, the production of Haute Couture makes itself accessible to only a few select members of society. Globally, there are only an estimated 4,000 direct consumers of Haute Couture (Hendrik). Given this limited market, the work of elite couturiers relies on other forms of artistic media, namely film, photography, and increasingly, museum spaces, to reach broader audiences who are then enabled to participate in the fashion ‘space’ via a process of visual consumption. For these audiences, Haute Couture is less about material consumption than it is about the aspirational consumption and contestation of notions of identity. This article uses qualitative textual analysis and draws on semiotic theory to explore symbolism and values in Haute Couture. Semiotics, an approach popularised by the work of Roland Barthes, examines signifiers as elements of the construction of metalanguage and myth. Barthes recognised a broad understanding of language that extended beyond oral and written forms. He acknowledged that a photograph or artefact may also constitute “a kind of speech” (111). Similarly, fashion can be seen as both an important signifier and mode of communication. The model of fashion as communication is one extensively explored within culture studies (e.g. Hall; Lurie). Much of the discussion of semiotics in this literature is predicated on sender/receiver models. These models conceive of fashion as the mechanism through which individual senders communicate to another individual or to collective (and largely passive) audiences (Barnard). Yet, fashion is not a unidirectional form of communication. It can be seen as a dialogical and discursive space of encounter and contestation. To understand the role of Haute Couture as a contested space of identity and socio-political discourse, this article examines the work of Chinese couturier Guo Pei. An artisan such as Guo Pei places the results of needle and thread into spaces of the theatrical, the spectacular, and, significantly, the powerfully socio-political. Guo Pei’s contributions to Haute Couture are extravagant, fantastical productions that also serve as spaces of socio-cultural information exchange and debate. Guo Pei’s creations bring together political history, memory, and fantasy. Here we explore the socio-cultural and political semiotics that emerge when the humble stitch is dramatically amplified onto the Haute Couture runway. We argue that Guo Pei’s work speaks not only to a cultural imaginary but also to the contested nature of gender and socio-political authority in contemporary China. The Politicisation of Fashion in China The majority of literature regarding Chinese fashion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has focussed on the use of fashion to communicate socio-political messages (Finnane). This is most clearly seen in analyses of the connections between dress and egalitarian ideals during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. As Zhang (952-952) notes, revolutionary fashion emphasised simplicity, frugality, and homogenisation. It rejected style choices that reflected both traditional Chinese and Western fashions. In Mao’s China, fashion was utilised by the state and adopted by the populace as a means of reinforcing the regime’s ideological orientations. For example, the ubiquitous Mao suit, worn by both men and women during the Cultural Revolution “was intended not merely as a unisex garment but a means to deemphasise gender altogether” (Feng 79). The Maoist regime’s intention to create a type of social equality through sartorial homogenisation was clear. Reflecting on the ways in which fashion both responded to and shaped women’s positionality, Mao stated, “women are regarded as criminals to begin with, and tall buns and long skirts are the instruments of torture applied to them by men. There is also their facial makeup, which is the brand of the criminal, the jewellery on their hands, which constitutes shackles and their pierced ears and bound feet which represent corporal punishment” (Mao cited in Finnane 23). Mao’s suit—the homogenising militaristic uniform adopted by many citizens—may have been intended as a mechanism for promoting equality, freeing women from the bonds of gendered oppression and all citizens from visual markers of class. Nonetheless, in practice Maoist fashion and policing of appearance during the Cultural Revolution enforced a politics of amnesia and perversely may have “entailed feminizing the undesirable, by conflating woman, bourgeoisie, and colour while also insisting on a type of gender equality that the belted Mao jacket belied” (Chen 161). In work on cultural transformations in the post-Maoist period, Braester argues that since the late 1980s Chinese cultural products—here taken to include artefacts such as Haute Couture—have similarly been defined by the politics of memory and identity. Evocation of historically important symbols and motifs may serve to impose a form of narrative continuity, connecting the present to the past. Yet, as Braester notes, such strategies may belie stability: “to contemplate memory and forgetting is tantamount to acknowledging the temporal and spatial instability of the post-industrial, globalizing world” (435). In this way, cultural products are not only sites of cultural continuity, but also of contestation. Imperial Dreams of Feminine Power The work of Chinese couturier Guo Pei showcases traditional Chinese embroidery techniques alongside more typically Western fashion design practices as a means of demonstrating not only Haute Couturier craftsmanship but also celebrating Chinese imperial culture through nostalgic fantasies in her contemporary designs. Born in Beijing, in 1967, at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Guo Pei studied fashion at the Beijing Second Light Industry School before working in private and state-owned fashion houses. She eventually moved to establish her own fashion design studio and was recognised as “the designer of choice for high society and the political elite” in China (Yoong 19). Her work was catapulted into Western consciousness when her cape, titled ‘Yellow Empress’ was donned by Rihanna for the 2015 Met Gala. The design was a response to an era in which the colour yellow was forbidden to all but the emperor. In the same year, Guo Pei was named an invited member of La Federation de la Haute Couture, becoming the first and only Chinese-born and trained couturier to receive the honour. Recognition of her work at political and socio-economic levels earned her an award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Economy and Cultural Diplomacy’ by the Asian Couture Federation in 2019. While Maoist fashion influences pursued a vision of gender equality through the ‘unsexing’ of fashion, Guo Pei’s work presents a very different reading of female adornment. One example is her exquisite Snow Queen dress, which draws on imperial motifs in its design. An ensemble of silk, gold embroidery, and Swarovski crystals weighing 50 kilograms, the Snow Queen “characterises Guo Pei’s ideal woman who is noble, resilient and can bear the weight of responsibility” (Yoong 140). In its initial appearance on the Haute Couture runway, the dress was worn by 78-year-old American model, Carmen Dell’Orefice, signalling the equation of age with strength and beauty. Rather than being a site of torture or corporal punishment, as suggested by Mao, the Snow Queen dress positions imagined traditional imperial fashion as a space for celebration and empowerment of the feminine form. The choice of model reinforces this message, while simultaneously contesting global narratives that conflate women’s beauty and physical ability with youthfulness. In this way, fashion can be understood as an intersectional space. On the one hand, Guo Pei's work reinvigorates a particular nostalgic vision of Chinese imperial culture and in doing so pushes back against the socio-political ‘non-fashion’ and uniformity of Maoist dress codes. Yet, on the other hand, positioning her work in the very elite space of Haute Couture serves to reinstate social stratification and class boundaries through the creation of economically inaccessible artefacts: a process that in turn involves the reification and museumification of fashion as material culture. Ideals of femininity, identity, individuality, and the expressions of either creating or dismantling power, are anchored within cultural, social, and temporal landscapes. Benedict Anderson argues that the museumising imagination is “profoundly political” (123). Like sacred texts and maps, fashion as material ephemera evokes and reinforces a sense of continuity and connection to history. Yet, the belonging engendered through engagement with material and imagined pasts is imprecise in its orientation. As much as it is about maintaining threads to an historical past, it is simultaneously an appeal to present possibilities. In his broader analysis, Anderson explores the notion of parallelity, the potentiality not to recreate some geographically or temporally removed place, but to open a space of “living lives parallel …] along the same trajectory” (131). Guo Pei’s creations appeal to a similar museumising imagination. At once, her work evokes both a particular imagined past of imperial grandeur, against instability of the politically shifting present, and appeals to new possibilities of gendered emancipation within that imagined space. Contesting and Complicating East-West Dualism The design process frequently involves borrowing, reinterpretation, and renewal of ideas. The erasure of certain cultural and political aspects of social continuity through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the socio-political changes thereafter, have created fertile ground for an artist like Guo Pei. Her palimpsest reaches back through time, picks up those cultural threads of extravagance, and projects them wholesale into the spaces of fashion in the present moment. Cognisance of design intentionality and historical and contemporary fashion discourses influence the various interpretations of fashion semiotics. However, there are also audience-created meanings within the various modes of performance and consumption. Where Kaiser and Green assert that “the process of fashion is inevitably linked to making and sustaining as well as resisting and dismantling power” (1), we can also observe that sartorial semiotics can have different meanings at different times. In the documentary, Yellow Is Forbidden, Guo Pei reflects on shifting semiotics in fashion. Speaking with a client, she remarks that “dragons and phoenixes used to represent the Chinese emperor—now they represent the spirit of the Chinese” (Brettkelly). Once a symbol of sacred, individual power, these iconic signifiers now communicate collective national identity. Both playing with and reimagining not only the grandeur of China’s imperial past, but also the particular role of the feminine form and female power therein, Guo Pei’s corpus evokes and complicates such contestations of power. On the one hand, her work serves to contest homogenising narratives of identity and femininity within China. Equally important, however, are the ways in which this work, which is possible both through and in spite of a Euro-American centric system of patronage within the fashion industry, complicates notions of East-West dualism. For Guo Pei, drawing on broadly accessible visual signifiers of Chinese heritage and culture has been critical in bringing attention to her endeavours. Her work draws significantly from her cultural heritage in terms of colour selections and traditional Chinese embroidery techniques. Symbols and motifs peculiar to Chinese culture are abundant: lotus flowers, dragons, phoenixes, auspicious numbers, and favourable Chinese language characters such as buttons in the shape of ‘double happiness’ (囍) are often present in her designs. Likewise, her techniques pay homage to traditional craft work, including Peranakan beading. The parallelity conjured by these choices is deliberate. In staging Guo Pei’s work for museum exhibitions at museums such as the Asian Civilizations Museum, her designs are often showcased beside the historical artefacts that inspired them (Fu). On her Chinese website, Guo Pei, highlights the historical connections between her designs and traditional Chinese embroidery craft through a sub-section of the “Spirit” header, entitled simply, “Inheritance”. These influences and expressions of Chinese culture are, in Guo Pei's own words her “design language” (Brettkelly). However, Guo Pei has also expressed an ambivalence about her positioning as a Chinese designer. She has maintained that she does not want “to be labelled as a Chinese storyteller ... and thinks about a global audience” (Yoong). In her expression of this desire to both derive power through design choices and historically situated practices and symbols, and simultaneously move beyond nationally bounded identity frameworks, Guo Pei positions herself in a space ‘betwixt and between.’ This is not only a space of encounter between East and West, but also a space that calls into question the limits and possibilities of semiotic expression. Authenticity and Legitimacy Global audiences of fashion rely on social devices of diffusion other than the runway: photography, film, museums, and galleries. Unique to Haute Couture, however, is the way in which such processes are often abstracted, decontextualised and pushed to the extremities of theatrical opulence. De Perthuis argues that to remove context “greatly reduce[s] the social, political, psychological and semiotic meanings” of fashion (151). When iconic motifs are utilised, the western gaze risks falling back on essentialising reification of identity. To this extent, for non-Chinese audiences Guo Pei’s works may serve not so much to problemitise historical and contemporary feminine identities and inheritances, so much as project an essentialisation of Chinese femininity. The double-bind created through Guo Pei’s simultaneous appeal to and resistance of archetypical notions of Chinese identity and femininity complicates the semiotic currency of her work. Moreover, Guo Pei’s work highlights tensions concerning understandings of Chinese culture between those in China and the diaspora. In her process of accessing reference material, Guo Pei has necessarily been driven to travel internationally, due to her concerns about a lack of access to material artefacts within China. She has sought out remnants of her ancestral culture in both the Chinese diaspora as well as material culture designed for export (Yoong; Brettkelly). This borrowing of Chinese design as depicted outside of China proper, alongside the use of western influences and patronage in Guo’s work has resulted in her work being dismissed by critics as “superficial … export ware, reimported” (Thurman). The insinuation that her work is derivative is tinged with denigration. Such critiques question not only the authenticity of the motifs and techniques utilised in Guo Pei’s designs, but also the legitimacy of the narratives of both feminine and Chinese identity communicated therein. Questions of cultural ‘authenticity’ serve to deny how culture, both tangible and intangible, is mutable over time and space. In his work on tourism, Taylor suggests that wherever “the production of authenticity is dependent on some act of (re)production, it is conventionally the past which is seen to hold the model of the original” (9). In this way, legitimacy of semiotic communication in works that evoke a temporally distant past is often seen to be adjudicated through notions of fidelity to the past. This authenticity of the ‘traditional’ associates ‘tradition’ with ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity.’ It is itself a form of mythmaking. As Guo Pei’s work is at once quintessentially Chinese and, through its audiences and capitalist modes of circulation, fundamentally Western, it challenges notions of authenticity and legitimacy both within the fashion world and in broader social discourses. Speaking about similar processes in literary fiction, Colavincenzo notes that works that attempt to “take on the myth of historical discourse and practice … expose the ways in which this discourse is constructed and how it fails to meet the various claims it makes for itself” (143). Rather than reinforcing imagined ‘truths’, appeals to an historical imagination such as that deployed by Guo Pei reveal its contingency. Conclusion In Fashion in Altermodern China, Feng suggests that we can “understand the sartorial as situating a set of visible codes and structures of meaning” (1). More than a reductionistic process of sender/receiver communication, fashion is profoundly embedded with intersectional dialogues. It is not the precision of signifiers, but their instability, fluidity, and mutability that is revealing. Guo Pei’s work offers narratives at the junction of Chinese and foreign, original and derivative, mythical and historical that have an unsettled nature. This ineffable tension between construction and deconstruction draws in both fashion creators and audiences. Whether encountering fashion on the runway, in museum cabinets, or on magazine pages, all renditions rely on its audience to engage with processes of imagination, fantasy, and memory as the first step of comprehending the semiotic languages of cloth. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2016. Barnard, Malcolm. "Fashion as Communication Revisited." Fashion Theory. Routledge, 2020. 247-258. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: J. Cape, 1972. Braester, Yomi. "The Post-Maoist Politics of Memory." A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Yingjin Zhang. London: John Wiley and Sons. 434-51. Brettkelly, Pietra (dir.). Yellow Is Forbidden. Madman Entertainment, 2019. Chen, Tina Mai. "Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao's China." Fashion Theory 5.2 (2001): 143-71. Colavincenzo, Marc. "Trading Fact for Magic—Mythologizing History in Postmodern Historical Fiction." Trading Magic for Fact, Fact for Magic. Ed. Marc Colavincenzo. Brill, 2003. 85-106. De Perthuis, Karen. "The Utopian 'No Place' of the Fashion Photograph." Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion. Eds. Andrea Kollnitz and Marco Pecorari. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 145-60. Feng, Jie. Fashion in Altermodern China. Dress Cultures. Eds. Reina Lewis and Elizabeth Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. Finnane, Antonia. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Fu, Courtney R. "Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture." Fashion Theory 25.1 (2021): 127-140. Hall, Stuart. "Encoding – Decoding." Crime and Media. Ed. Chris Greer. London: Routledge, 2019. Hendrik, Joris. "The History of Haute Couture in Numbers." Vogue (France), 2021. Kaiser, Susan B., and Denise N. Green. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Lurie, Alison. The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Taylor, John P. "Authenticity and Sincerity in Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 28.1 (2001): 7-26. Thurman, Judith. "The Empire's New Clothes – China’s Rich Have Their First Homegrown Haute Couturier." The New Yorker, 2016. Yoong, Jackie. "Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture." Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2019. Zhang, Weiwei. "Politicizing Fashion: Inconspicuous Consumption and Anti-Intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution in China." Journal of Consumer Culture 21.4 (2021): 950-966.

We live in the “age of curation”, according to Eliot van Buskirk. In this issue of M/C Journal we bring together authors from diverse fields to explore what this ‘age’ looks, sounds and feels like. In so doing, the papers highlight both the ubiquitous and contested nature of curation. In this collection, authors variously demonstrate that curation functions as an ongoing process of mediation, orchestration and representation. While many of the articles maintain connections to the etymology of the term, referring to the Latin root of curate - curare or to care - their foci move substantially away from its traditional location within the sphere of the arcane, wherein the curate was responsible for the care of souls. Instead, the issues addressed are concerned with more earthly manifestations of this practice ranging from investigations of transport policy through to how food can be curated to tell a story of nationhood. Via analysis of such diverse topics, this issue demonstrates key shifts in the meanings generated by the term curate. The modernist conception of curate relegated the term to the realm of cultural institutions within which the art or museum curator focused on her capacity to select, collate and display artefacts acting “as a kind of interface between artist, institution and audience” (Graham and Cook 10). Implied within this view of curatorship is a form of neutrality in the curatorial process. The curatorial presence appears traceless or invisible and the selected artefacts are represented as being responsible for the relay of cultural narratives. However, following the ‘curatorial turn’ in the 1960s, in which “curators were beginning to make visible the mediating component within the formation, production, and dissemination of an exhibition” (O’Neill 13) it became clear that curators and the curatorial process had “crucial significance” in the production of meanings of artefacts (Staniszewski 91). Through this lens, curatorial praxis no longer equated to objective presentation of cultural objects. Instead it came to be seen as a process of mediation and translation (Lind) mired in a “complex, interminable procedure of adjustment of variable social ambitions and interests” (16). Accompanying this shift was the rise of what O’Neill refers to as a “distinct mode of discourse” (Culture 2) for curatorship and the repositioning of both the curator and the curatorial act in the 1980s and 1990s as “a mode of proactive participation in the processes of artistic production” (5). Through these shifts, the curator came to be seen as charged with the task of translating artefacts for consumption. More recently, alongside the role of this “proactive participation” we have witnessed the so-called democratisation of curation through the explosion of digital technologies. Social media create new ways for people to access, select and assemble information. The curatorial process is no longer solely in the hands of experts, nor is it only grounded in the processes and outputs of individual, or groups of, curators. It now also includes the input of dynamic networked systems and software that facilitate selection and prioritisation of artefacts (Krysa). In response to these seismic shifts in the terrain, Terry Smith notes, “curating is everywhere being extended, encompassing every kind of organising of any body of images or set of actions” (17). In this issue our authors investigate specific encounters with diverse practices of curating in the contemporary world to offer insight into what it means to live in the “age of curation”. Our feature piece, from curator Anna Edmundson, provides an overview of the museum curator in the “postdigital” age and offers some illuminating insights into the impacts, or lack thereof, of technology and everyday curatorial practice on the traditional role of the curator. In relation to big data, Daniel Ashton and Martin Couzins focus their attention on the rise of professional content curators. By anchoring their analysis in an autoethnographic account of Couzins’ content curation business, the authors explore the idea of content curators as cultural intermediaries, co-creators and “sense-makers”. With a focus on journalistic practice, Anita Howarth emphasises the importance of news curation in the media. She explores the differences between content creation and content curation, highlighting the creativity required to successfully carry out both tasks. In relation to the exponential rise of non-expert curators, Amy Antonio and David Tuffley’s paper demonstrates the need for the introduction of pedagogical practices designed to assist University students develop skills to manage big data and assess the quality of content. Roger Dawkins concentrates on meaning-making through his semiotic analysis of social media engagement and content curation. Milena Droumeva focuses on the technology itself, exploring how mobile digital devices, specifically those related to the auditory realm, impact on how “we make sense of the sensory ‘everyday’”. Curatorship is used by Helen Fordham as a metaphor to offer insights into the role played by the public intellectual in cultural life. Through her analysis of Australia’s ‘History Wars’, Fordham argues that “public debates about particular topics can operate like discursive exhibitions” with the public intellectual assuming a “curatorial role” in this process. Tin-yuet Ting offers an example of political curatorship in his analysis of the deployment of social networking sites by a grassroots social movement. Ting provides a detailed illustration of how activists can curate dynamic, up-to-date and persuasive narratives on social networking sites for successful online and offline mobilisation. Nicholas Richardson’s examination of the development of transport policy in NSW offers a different view of political curatorship and media. Richardson argues that mediatisation—the growing influence of media on the framing of political discourse—is problematic because it enables politicians to frame public discourse around political agendas at the expense of the knowledge and expertise held by bureaucrats and technicians. In his analysis of the alternate-reality game Ingress, Kyle Moore explores the role of street art in urban mobile gaming as situated play that “via the practice of re-reading, re-mixing, and re-mediating urban environments” constitutes a form of urban curating. Elaine Mahon’s paper extends the purview of curation to food, demonstrating how the Irish State Banquet held for Queen Elizabeth II in May 2011 was carefully orchestrated to represent “Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity”. Within more traditional curatorial arenas, the papers in this issue emphasise the need for the practice of curatorship to be flexible and responsive to a variety of audiences. Fashion curating provides the focal point of Sharon Peoples’ article in which she argues for greater focus on dress in museum exhibitions. Beaux Guarini’s work centres on people with blindness or low-vision, with his paper highlighting the importance of curators developing exhibitions that provide multisensory encounters with artefacts to ensure they are socially and culturally inclusive experiences. Within the framework of a practice-based University course, Ulrike Sturm, Denise Beckton and Donna Lee Brien argue that the practice of curating and mounting an exhibition should not simply be seen as an end-point, but as a creative outcome that can feed into the ongoing development of creative works. This collection of articles highlights the broadening scope of curation and identifies ongoing challenges in understanding what this practice means and how it might continue to develop. We would like to thank each and every author who contributed to this issue. You were a delight to work with. References Graham, Beryl, and Sarah Cook. Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2010. Krysa, Joasia. Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. Lind, Maria. “Performing the Curatorial: An Introduction.” Performing the Curatorial within and beyond Art, ed. Maria Lind. Berlin: Sternberg P, 2012. O’Neill, Paul. “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse.” Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, eds. Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007. 13-28. O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge: MIT P, 2012. Smith, Terry E. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International, 2012. Staniszewksi, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge: MIT P 1998. Van Buskirk, Eliot. “Overwhelmed? Welcome the Age of Curation.” Wired 14 May 2010. 5 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.wired.com/2010/05/feeling-overwhelmed-welcome-the-age-of-curation/›.

Abstract This chapter surveys the life and work of Samuel Johnson from his arrival in London in 1737 to his receipt of a pension in 1762. These were Johnson’s most productive years during which he published his major poems, the Rambler and Adventurer periodical essays, the Dictionary and Rasselas, as well as much miscellaneous journalism. Johnson’s domestic life changed fundamentally with the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1752. From that time onward, his household-family always included a number of dependants: of particular importance were Anna Williams, Francis Barber, and Robert Levet. Outside the home Johnson’s social circle grew with the formation of the Ivy Lane club and the development of a number of significant friendships: among those whom Johnson came to know were John Hawkins, Arthur Murphy, Robert Chambers, Bennet Langton, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Percy.

This chapter opens with a case study, assessing the impact of a century of protestant reforms on the layout and liturgy of the parish church of All Saints’, Bolton Percy, in the early 1650s—a time when both the poet, Andrew Marvell, and his patron, the former lord general of the parliamentary army, Thomas, third lord Fairfax, were parishioners. The chapter explores how Thomas Fairfax had helped preserve the stained glass and other features of Bolton Percy church, in spite of parliamentary ordinances directing the destruction of church idols and images, including those in windows. Yet Fairfax’s distaste for forms of protestant iconoclasm nevertheless co-existed with his presbyterian beliefs—a conjunction that may seem surprising, were it not for the fact that this study has uncovered a similar ambivalence towards religious violence and ruin creation in other avowedly puritan writers, from Spenser to Marvell. The chapter goes on to explore the Laudian apologist, Peter Heylyn’s identification with the religious conservatism of the Elizabethan church, arguing against the conventions of reformation historiography by suggesting that it was by no means only Laudians who sought to slow the pace of reformation and return the seventeenth-century church to the sobrieties of the Elizabethan settlement. The ambivalence of writers across the early modern period towards forms of reformation violence points rather to an anti-iconoclastic tradition that was indigenous to English protestantism in its formative century—suggesting that Laudian opposition to protestant iconoclasm was less ‘avant-garde’ than reformation historians have hitherto suggested.