Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Rural poor – Fiction"

This study uses the Dialect in British Fiction 1800–1836 database to chart the changing representation of the language of the labouring poor during the early nineteenth century. It finds that, broadly speaking, while the voices of the labouring poor are sometimes represented in novels at the start of the period, most novels evince little interest in either the linguistic nuances of these characters’ speech, or the access to their lives and thoughts that this speech provides. Around the middle of the period, there is a rapid increase in the fictional representation of the voices of the labouring poor specifically in novels set in rural Scotland and Ireland and – at least in some novels – this is connected to a greater interest in the lives and perspectives of these characters. By the end of the period, while there is a broadening out into extraterritorial varieties and a continuing interest in the voices of the rural labouring poor of Scotland and Ireland, these developments have not translated in any substantial way to an interest in either the rural labouring poor of England or Wales, or the urban labouring poor of any nation or region. Overall, the study demonstrates how fiction can be used to provide an insight into changing attitudes towards speakers and language varieties.

This article analyzes aspects of the capitalist formation in Brazil, understanding it as an authoritarian process, in which the specificities of the territory were not considered, promoting the creation of poor regions and populations. It will analyze the transformations that the economy has placed on space, transfiguring rural environments into pockets of urban inequalities. The understanding of such questions becomes necessary as part of the studies of the fiction work Inferno Provisório (2016), by Luiz Ruffato. This work, through a fragmentary language and historical perspective, pays attention to the ills of contemporary Brazil and seeks explanations for them in the arrival of italian immigrants as a replacement for slave labor.

This paper focuses on the Indian cultural background having the themes like hunger, poverty, famine, war, politics, freedom, imperialism, economic exploitation, class consciousness in the Indo-Anglian English fiction writer Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel So Many Hungers!, related to the socio-political and economic situations of Bengali’s society. The theme of the novel is mainly the existing pressing problems of India especially the rural India before and after the Independence. Realism is one of the most remarkable features of Bhabani Bhattacharya’s fiction. His novel shows a passionate awareness of life in India, the social awakening and protest, the utter poverty of peasants, the Indian freedom struggle and its various dimensions, the tragedy of partition of the country, the social and political transitions, the mental as well as the physical agony of the poor peasants and labor class people of the Indian society, especially that of Bengal and other adjoining states. Bhattacharya believes that an artist should inevitably be concerned with truth and reality, his portrayal of the life and society is never a photographic one nor a journalistic record. One can very well find the reflection of Indian culture, tradition and struggle in it.

The life-work of novelist/essayist/folklorist Zora Neale Hurston has been recently and lovingly salvaged from the black hole of literary oblivion. This reclamation occurs during a time of increasing attention paid to marginalia within various discourses of theory. This theoretical and historical coincidence has inspired me to question the continued relegation of Hurston’s life-work to the realm of “the literary” and the virtual absence of any serious exploration of its anthropological significance. In this study, therefore, I turn to Hurston as a writer of culture. I argue that Hurston’s work exemplifies the increasingly complex contemporary “field” in which anthropologists write culture, and thus animates the contemporary rethinking underway regarding the process, product and status of ethnographic writing. Her writing of culture weaves intriguingly back and forth over the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, white culture and black culture, wealthy urban class and poor rural class, and, perhaps most interestingly, ‘subject’–anthropologist and ‘object’-culture. In tracing the sense in which Hurstons’s work continuously problematizes such simple we-they oppositions and the search for a singular voice, I argue that the theoretical insights of deconstruction take us a long way in understanding the politics of representation at work in Hurston’s heterogeneous texts, and help us to rethink their status as ‘representational’.

Abstract After his death in 2012, there has been a notable resurgence of both popular and critical interest in the fiction of American writer Harry Crews. Frequently discussed in the context of Southern gothic, Crews’s novels are notable for their grim and darkly funny tales of life among the rural poor in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia, USA. Still, while the regional identity of Crews’s fiction is strong, his subtle and deeply sympathetic creative imagination tackles questions of universal significance. In the novel A Feast of Snakes (1976), Crews’s finest and most multi-layered work, we are introduced to former high-school football quarterback Joe Lon Mackey on the eve of Mystic, Georgia’s annual Rattlesnake Roundup. Through his sensitive and deeply-felt portrayal of Joe Lon’s failed struggle to reconcile with the traumas of the past and establish meaning and a sense of purpose in life, a development culminating in the liquidation of a snake-handling preacher, a sheriff’s deputy, his own high-school sweetheart, and a random bystander, Crews not only explores the deterministic cultural and socio-economic attributes of the rural south, but also gives articulation to a reflective consciousness far more individuated and multifaceted than allowed for in recent critical discourse. This sombre ending is perhaps what Todorov would term “the realization of an order always preordained,” but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as merely the inevitable outcome of yet another southern boy’s unarticulated rage against modernity. Struggling endlessly like the pitfighting dogs his daddy breeds, Joe Lon, entangled in the determinants of his existence, comes to give mimetic shape to a contemporary American identity both utterly strange and jarringly familiar.

The presented article considers the peculiarities of extracurricular educational work in rural school conditions. The problem of developing the interests and abilities of students, restoring their strength and strengthening health, meeting the needs for knowledge, communication and practical activities in the process of extracurricular educational work carried out in students’ free time is updated. Emphasis is placed on taking into account the specifics of a general education organization located in rural areas. In this regard, the practicability of involving parents in joint work with children, cooperation between teachers and parents, and providing students with significant independence in the process of extracurricular work (while the teacher uses various forms and methods of education) are argued. The article recommends the wide use of local history material in preparation of educational events. It is argued that the educational effect of the event will be more if the child himself shows personal interest and attention to it, creativity and fiction. Considering rural school, a preschool educational organization and a cultural center as a single center for the cultural life of the village, the authors analyze the difficulties that reduce the effectiveness of extracurricular work in rural school: conducting educational measures of adversarial nature in the absence of parallel classes, poor material and technical support, insufficient equipment of the school with modern equipment, etc. The article emphasizes that the rural teacher should devote a significant place in his work to creating educational situations, focusing on the individual characteristics of students, determining the sequence of actions when including children in socially significant activities and distributing roles taking into account the wishes and capabilities of everyone, which is a prerequisite for improving extracurricular activities in educational organizations in rural areas.

To explore Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s rise from obscure rural Haiti to become the nation’s first democratically elected president—by a landslide—is to enter into a world and a swirl of events that reads like surreal fiction or magical realism. As a Catholic priest (Salesian order), Aristide was fueled by the religio-socialist principles of liberation theology, which emerged as a significant force in Latin America primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, forcefully and vocally advocating for the masses of Haitian poor mired in deeply-entrenched disenfranchisement and exploitation. As a charismatic spokesperson for the popular democratic movement in Haiti during an era of entrenched dictatorship and repressive violence, Aristide boldly confronted the “four-headed monster” of the Haitian power structure—the army, the church hierarchy, the tontons macoutes, and the wealthy elite. His seemingly impossible escape from multiple assassination attempts, together with the power of his colorful rhetoric and his close association with urban slum dwellers and rural peasants, led to a rising “flood” (or lavalas) that invested him with an aura of Spirit, or mistik, that in either/both the Haitian-embraced tradition of Christianity or vodoun (voodoo) served to energize and greatly reassure an intense mass movement arrayed against seemingly impossible odds. This article focuses on the rise of Aristide as the embodiment and voice of Spirit among the people and does not extend into his tumultuous secular years in and out of the presidency, having been twice the victim of coups (1991 and 2004); instead it focuses primarily on the years 1985–1990 and does not enter into an assessment of Aristide as president. Aristide’s own vivid narratives of this time, segments of his sermons, and later, passages of his poetry serve to bolster the literary quality or interpretation of this brief but vividly colorful historic epoch in the Haitian experience.

Premchand's novels Godan and Rangbhoomi related to farmers and laborers are such works, which if called the epic story of laborers, farmers and Dalit victims and women victims, then it will not be an exaggeration because India being an agricultural country, farmers and laborers are the foundation of Indian culture. The stories of Premchand's Poos Ki Raat, Sava Seer Wheat, Muktimarg, Algyozha, Demolition etc. are mainly focused on the life of the farmer. The full depiction of rural life that we get in Premchand's literature is rare elsewhere, in his fiction, in spite of the predominance of the mainstream farmers of the society at that time, the Dalits, farm-labourers, Bhabbuje, living in the margins of rural life, Poor-farmers, shepherds, kanjars, tailors, etc. all came under his gaze with their heat and sorrow. Such marginalized characters are seen in their stories. Abstract in Hindi Language: प्रेमचन्द के किसान व मजदूरों से संबंधित उनके उपन्यास गोदान और रंगभूमि ऐसी रचनाएँ है जिनको मजदूर, किसान और दलित पीडित व महिला पीडित की महागाथा कहा जाये तो अतिशयोक्ति न होगी क्योकि भारत एक कृषि प्रधान देश होने के कारण किसान व मजदूर भारतीय संस्कृति का मूलाधार है। प्रेमचन्द की पूस की रात, सवा सेर गेहूँ, मुक्तिमार्ग, अलग्योझा, विध्वंस आदि कहानियाँ मुख्य रूप से किसान जीवन पर केन्द्रित है। ग्रामीण जीवन का जितना भरा पूरा चित्रण हमे प्रेमचन्द के साहित्य में मिलता है वह अन्यत्र विरल है इन्होने अपने कथा साहित्य में तात्कालीन समय में समाज के मुख्यधारा के किसनों की प्रधानता के बावजूद ग्रामीण जीवन के हाशिए में जी रहे दलित, खेत-मजदूर, भड़भूजे, गरीब-किसान, घसियारे, कंजड़, दर्जी आदि सब उनकी निगाह के दायरे में अपने ताप-त्रास के साथ आये। इनकी कहानियों में ऐसे ही हाशिए के विभिन्न चरित्र देखने को मिलते है। Keywords: ग्रामीण जीवन, मजदूर, किसान, पिछडे वर्ग

The article examines the conditions, tasks and main trends of the libraries in the Stalingrad region in the post-war period (1945 — early 1950s). Materials of periodicals and local history publications, as well as reporting materials related to the work of libraries in the specified period serve as a sourse base for the study.In the context of the revival of Stalingrad and the Stalingrad region, the priorities for the state and society were those aimed at restoring the socio-economic potential and the cultural sector. The author emphasizes that, in this development vector, an important aspect of the activities of cultural institutions was organization of leisure activities for children and youth.Libraries of the region were among the first cultural organizations that began to open their doors after the battle of Stalingrad and the end of the Great Patriotic War, so they had to carry out extensive political, mass, cultural and educational work for the population, including children and youth.In the wake of the devastation of the entire socio-cultural sphere and infrastructure of the city and the region, the poor resource base of educational and cultural institutions, it was important to create conditions for adaptation to peaceful circumstances, to counteract child homelessness, to unite the creative forces of young people and to increase their cultural and educational level. Urban and rural libraries, reading rooms and libraries at clubs become actively involved in solving socially significant problems through various forms, methods and means of organizing children’s and youth leisure and recreation.For the first time in a long time, libraries began to organize holidays and recitals, open readings of fiction for schoolchildren, and meetings with visiting and local cultural figures for young people. The important place in the leisure of young people was given to self-education and improving the culture of reading, that emphasized the special importance of the library as a centre of knowledge and a model of preservation of cultural norms.The author concludes that libraries have played a major role in the organization of leisure of children and youth, and their activities served as an important auxiliary resource of party cells and public organizations to restore the entire cultural sector of the city and region.

The author analyzes the multifaceted research, theoretical, and practical activities of A.V. Dukhnovych (1803–1865) – a talented poet, prose writer, publicist, historian, ethnographer, playwright, teacher, publisher, a well-known “Buditel’” (i.e. awakener) of the Carpathian people. The author studies and describes Dukhnovych’s creative heritage to define the main directions of his cultural and educational activities in the fields of philosophy, history, geography, pedagogy, socio-culture, linguistics, theology, ethnography, agriculture, phytotherapy, etc. Dukhnovich was a convinced traditional educator, who sincerely believed that education can significantly alleviate the plight of the masses. He founded educational societies, organized more than 70 elementary schools, published textbooks, almanacs, calendars. He supported several gymnasiums in Subcarpathian Rus, where teaching was conducted in Russian. Dukhnovich established a scholarship fund for poor pupils and students, organized free cafeterias, etc. The analysis of his epistolary, autobiographical materials, and works of fiction provide an insight into the socio-political and cultural life of the Rusins in the middle of the 19th century. Dukhnovich’s creative heritage includes the first “Primer” for public schools (“Reading Book for Beginners” (1847)); the first textbooks on geography (“A Short Landpiece for Young Rusins” (1851)); history (“General History for Young Rusins” (1851), “The True History of the Carpathossians, or Hungarian Rusins” (1853)); the ethnographic work “On the Peoples of the Extreme or Ugric Carpathians, living near the Beskid in the Zemplínska, Uzhhorod and Sharisha capitals” (1848); “Abridged Grammar of the Written Russian language” (1853); “Folk Pedagogy for the Benefit of Rural Teachers” (1857), which was the first textbook on pedagogy in Western Ukraine published in Lvov; “Menology” (1850, 1851, 1854, 1857), other teaching manuals, articles, poetic works, dumas, and plays. His poem “Vruchanie” became the national anthem of Ugrian Rus. As a democratic educator, he convinced many that the active national and cultural life of the Rusins fully depends on the dissimination of education among the people to bring up the younger generation in the vein of virtue and national dignity. By his personal example, Dukhnovich lead people to spiritual dimensions and influences the worldview and patriotism of the intelligentsia in Subcarpathian Rus. He made a significant contribution to the education of the people, laid the foundations for many cultural and educational societies in Subcarpathian Rus in the 19th century and later – not only in his native land, but also far beyond its borders.

This paper analyzes the current relationship between Peruvian teenagers and television. The information accessed from various sources concluded that adolescents are consuming television extensively, especially the poorer within the country. Teens appreciate the cable television as a source of learning, and its variety and ability to relate it with the world. The interest in cartoons, movies and series –fiction genre in general– affirms the value of this media in society as well as the possibility to make them more familiar with their environment. Information about what happens beyond their localities is a source of reference in their perception of the country. Beyond the cultural conflict from which is generally assessed from the effects that television may have on the rural world, television has a positive sign for the visual deterritorialization, which dissolves the natural relationship between culture and territory. In rural areas, parents and teenagers evaluate television positively because it offers more than just the school itself. In the midst of academic and professional criticism on television, adolescents do not distinguish between traditional media and new media, they are all integrated into their daily lives.El presente trabajo analiza la relación actual de los adolescentes peruanos con la pantalla televisiva. La información consultada en diversas fuentes concluye que los adolescentes siguen consumiendo ampliamente la televisión, especialmente los más pobres de ciudades del interior del Perú. Los adolescentes valoran la televisión por cable como una fuente de aprendizaje, así como por su variedad y por la posibilidad de relacionarlos con el mundo. El interés por los dibujos animados y las series y películas y, en general, por la ficción televisiva, reafirma el sentido que tiene la televisión en familiarizarlos con la sociedad y su entorno. La información de lo que acontece más allá de sus localidades es fuente de referencia en su percepción del país y es compartida en familia. Más allá del conflicto cultural, desde el cual generalmente se ha evaluado los efectos de la televisión en el medio rural, ésta tiene para los adolescentes y sus padres un signo positivo porque favorece la desterritorialización visual al disolver la relación natural entre cultura y territorio geográfico. En el medio rural los padres y los jóvenes valoran a la televisión porque les ofrece más que la propia escuela. En medio de la crítica académica y profesional a la televisión, los adolescentes no distinguen entre medios tradicionales y nuevos medios porque todos ellos están integrados a su vida cotidiana.

This article examines the importance of the working country garden to the memorial narratives of Ford Madox Ford. It begins with a study of Ford before the Great War; considering how his particular brand of Literary Impressionism was frequently used to make a case for memorializing the rural poor and their surrounding landscape from The Heart of the Country (1906) to The Fifth Queen saga (1906–08). Moving to Post-War Sussex and Kent, it examines Ford's continuing interest in the country garden and rural community, reading his gardening practices as attempted personal reconstruction through faith in landscape production. As Ford moves from small-holding to small-holding, and eventually away for good, it discusses how the narratives of his part-fictive biographies, including Thus to Revisit (1921) and It was the Nightingale (1934), repeatedly return to rural England to resituate the developments of Literary Impressionism – and Ford's most formative literary friendships – in and about the garden. The repetitions of garden work; of sowing, weeding, and digging over plots, proved essential to Ford's in-text ritualisations of rural life and literary innovation alike.

This essay focuses on Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955) and Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and discusses the style of Satyajit Ray’s filmmaking which combined the aesthetics of European verisimilitude with suggestive symbolism based on conventional Indian iconography. The paper will concentrate on the authentic representation of a poor family in rural Bengal in Pather Panchali and the urban setting, in his last film Agantuk. The main aim is to explore how the detailing of the shots and the dialogues in these films engage in the ethnographic study of the Bengali society through these cinematographic fictional narratives

Sue Currell’s paper discussed the idea of purity on several levels of discourse: firstly, as a historical trope by which both “welfare” and eugenics were promoted as progress, seen in the metaphorical ideas of welfare as “social house cleaning” or the pure and thereby efficient body during the 1930s. Secondly, how “pure” records such as well-intentioned documentary photographs aiming to uplift the rural poor were “infected” with the “fictions” of eugenic discourse around gene impurity. Finally, how researching the history of eugenics raises further trouble by hanging out the “dirty laundry” of the process of history making itself, in raising the problematic of historical knowledge and pure truths/transparent meanings, arguing that the methodological issues raised by researching eugenics highlight mostly an “impure”, tainted, or incomplete historical record that needs acknowledgment.

‘Epidemics’ of teenage pregnancy and ‘amazing rises’ in illegitimacy are part of a recurrent moral panic about the social implications of sexual nonconformity. Simultaneously, major social surveys attempt to provide empirical assessments of actual sexual behaviour. There is often a yawning gulf between the images created by press and politicians and the experiences of their subjects. Similarly, in the 1850s when statistics first ruptured the cosy notion that rural Scotland was the home of all that was virtuous and that vice inhabited the cities, perplexed clerics and reformers set about creating convenient fictions to explain high levels of bastardy in farming districts. Their conclusions tell us far more about middle-class suppositions about sexual attitudes than they do about the motives of those that they purported to be investigating. Thus explanation of rural sexual behaviour needs to be sought in ways that reach beyond the ideology of social concern. This paper explores, first, the vocabularies of motive informing social investigation and, secondly, the local contexts in which women conceived, bore and reared their children, and the roles of poor relief, the churches, grandparents and fathers. Far from representing ‘an index of “disorganisation” in an urbanising epoch‘, unmarried motherhood appears to have been both a relevant and culturally sanctioned response to straitened circumstances (Goode, 1961). The discussion considers the pervasiveness of attempts to classify and contain illegitimacy within an underclass interpretation despite clear evidence to the contrary. Against such willing opacity, accessing the motives of the parents themselves remains a tantalizingly difficult exercise, especially when dealing with historical data beyond oral recall. The routes by which intentionality may be inferred are critically assessed.

After the two world wars and India's independence from the British in 1947, English-language writing in India has advanced significantly. Since the two world wars and India's independence from the British in 1947, Indian Writing in English, as it was once known, has advanced significantly with a few countable writers on the horizon. There weren't many writers in the corpus of works that were produced in the English language by Indian writers, especially before the label changed from Indo-Anglian Literature (that was named such before) to Indian Writing in English. The two most recent female authors to contribute to the field of Indian English literature are Kiran Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri, yet their creativity transcends the confines of gender. They speak to an Indian culture that has experienced social anguish and cultural displacement both inside and outside of their own nation as a result of globalisation and immigration. They express the suffering of Indian immigrants who have migrated in foreign countries and are filled with sentiments of loneliness and displacement while having no other options for freedom on many fronts. The selection of these two highly regarded and award-winning authors was made for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are both contemporary writers with a wide range of parallels and differences. They share a lot of traits, yet they also naturally vary in overt and subtle ways. Nonetheless, the literary output they provide readers with is overwhelmingly impressive, and they give voice to the world's silent immigrants. They present sorrowful, yet true, stories. For instance, the fictional character Biju from Kiran Desai's novella “Inheritance of Loss” has heart breaking anecdotes to share with us about his status as an illegal immigrant and how he concealed from American Immigration police agents by vanishing from the restaurant and through the hotel's mouse hole. There are now tens of thousands of Bijus living in countries like the United States, Germany, France, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc. Lahiri contrasts the two lives of two brothers who are travelling in opposite directions in her novel “Lowland”, which is a poignant and emotional depiction of immigrants. State terrorism claims the life of a young man as the wealthy continue to amass ever-increasing wealth at the expense of the poor, who continue to live in poverty. The “Lowland”, which was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2013, is sensitive to the brutal realities of society and the way the state uses the rural and ignorant majority for political purposes. The handling of female characters in immigrant stories also calls for a critical examination of Lahiri and Desai's literary creations. Another one of the well-known female writer Margaret Atwood in her novel “Surfacing” the main subject is separation. This is established in the opening chapter, as it is revealed that the narrator is politically dispossessed as an English speaker living in Quebec at a period when Québec was wanting to become an independent French-speaking nation. The narrator compares human contact to that of animals because she feels cut off from the people around her. As an illustration, the narrator thinks of an animal "at the instant the trap closes" while overhearing David and Anna having sex. Extremist David, who argues that Canada would be better off without the "fascist pig Yanks" and advises that they be driven out of the country by assault beavers, is the face of nationalism. The researcher opted to pick these two Indian immigrant women writers and Margaret Atwood for the dissertation as a result.

While British period drama provides appealing images of the past, the self-portrayal in Flemish period fiction is much grubbier. Flanders is mostly represented as a poor rural region, inhabited by hard-working peasants. While this representation of 'poor Flanders' partly corresponds to the real situation at the turn of the century, it is not a mere reflection. On the contrary, these series selectively construct a particular image of the past, which fits within wider discourses about Flemish identity. While this representation is not overtly nationalistic, it does support the Flemish emancipation as it suggests the existence of a long suppressed nation that, through perseverance and hard work, finally gets its due autonomy and recognition. However, in order to onderstand this representation of the past, it is also necessary to take into account the institutional context of the broadcaster's economic and artistic 'poverty'.

This paper explores the Indian cultural background through the themes of food and freedom in the novel renowned writer Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers. The novel tackles various literal and metaphorical forms of hunger, such as poverty, famine, war, politics, imperialism, economic exploitation, and class consciousness. These themes are intricately connected to Bengali society's socio-political and economic conditions. Bhattacharya’s work sheds light on the significant issues facing rural India before and after independence. A prominent feature of Bhattacharya’s fiction is the emphasis on the hunger for food and freedom. His novel displays a profound and passionate understanding of Indian life, characterized by social arising and protest. It vividly portrays the severe poverty of peasants, the intricacies of the Indian independence struggle, and the complex tragedy of the nation’s division. Bhattacharya effectively captures the social and political transitions of the era, alongside the severe mental and physical suffering endured by poor peasants and labourers, particularly in Bengal and adjacent states. Bhattacharya believes that an artist should move beyond merely creating a photographic or journalistic record of life and society. Instead, his depiction is profoundly reflective, encapsulating the essence of poverty, Indian culture, tradition, and the struggle for freedom. His narrative transcends superficial observations, providing a detailed perspective on the socio-economic and political challenges faced by Indian society. In the novel, Bhattacharya offers a vivid representation of India’s socio-political landscape. The novel’s realistic portrayal of the period’s hardships, coupled with its exploration of broader themes, delivers a thorough understanding of Bengal's cultural and historical context. Bhattacharya’s work stands as a testimony to the resilience and essence of the Indian people, highlighting their persistent poverty, struggles and aspirations.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

In today's society there is evidence of a culture of the 'empowered consumer' -- an image of the consumer as a citizen rather than a subordinate. In fact, human rights language is increasingly coming to the fore in the consumption debate. The consumer has been allocated rights by the United Nations whereby all human beings are born free and equal and have civil, political, economic and social rights (McGregor 44). However, as citizens we also have responsibilities of an environmental and social concern. Food retailing and equality of shopping provision is one such concern. Food is a basic right. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and have access to safe and nutritious food. Social exclusion refers to those in the population who are unable to participate in economic, political, social and cultural life. Social exclusion is different from, but related to, poverty since it further marginalises the most disadvantaged -- for example, those who cannot access a large supermarket. In keeping with the rights/responsibilities language, the consumer has a basic right to food and the retailer has the social responsibility to supply the needs of the consumer. It is in this respect that food is an ethical issue and has social justice implications. Inability to consume, or have access to, sufficient food of nutritional quality is a global concern. In North America the issue is one of 'food insecurity' or 'food poverty' due to inadequate finance to purchase sufficient food. In the United Kingdom the same problem arises within the context of access to food stores. This is identified as a 'food (shopping) desert', where due to restricted access social exclusion can arise. The term 'food deserts' was first used by the Low Income Project Team of the Nutrition Task Force in 1996 and was succinctly defined by Tessa Jowell (Government Health Minister) in 1997 when she stated that a food desert was an area "where people do not have easy access to healthy, fresh foods particularly if they are poor and have limited mobility". The term 'food desert' is an emotive one referring to a unique tool of social polarisation and exclusion (Lang 5). The issues compounding the problem include low income, locational policy of supermarkets with the acquisition of edge-of-town / out-of-town sites, consumer mobility, car ownership levels and food availability. This research study focuses on Northern Ireland -- a region of the UK on the periphery of Europe. The Province of Northern Ireland (Ulster) is a sparsely populated (122 people per km²), predominantly rural area with the highest unemployment and poverty statistics in the United Kingdom. Similarly, Northern Ireland has a proportionately high degree of non-car ownership (35%) which further complicates the equation since shopping is increasingly becoming a car-borne activity necessitating transportation to edge-of-town superstores. Those not able to avail themselves of large edge-of-town superstores are being socially excluded, since inner-city areas are becoming denuded of food stores. Those that do exist usually have a limited range of food items, usually non-perishable, or are specialist shops stocking high priced items. It is the aim of the study to identify the characteristics, extent and location of food deserts in both rural and urban areas of Northern Ireland. It is a particularly apt time to do so since Northern Ireland is experiencing a 'retail revolution' with the arrival of the major UK grocery multiples and subsequent situational policies to locate off-centre. Similarly, there are plans to curtail out-of-town developments which has been viewed by some smaller retailers as "too little, too late". With the above in mind, it is a timely study for Northern Ireland. Multiple research tools of both a qualitative and a quantitative nature have been employed including consumer focus groups, shopping diaries, comparative shopping exercises, consumer questionnaires and retail interviews. This will enable sufficient validation of results. The focus groups provide qualitative depth (Colquhoun 39) and serve to highlight the issues of shopping inequality from the point of view of different consumer groups which could be identified as potentially vulnerable in the food poverty stakes; the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed or low income families, lone-parent families and females in general; to whom falls the responsibility for provisioning the household, organising the kitchen and doing the household's cooking (Murcott 11). Basically, food is gendered -- women are mainly in charge (Vaines 13). The respondents in this study demonstrate exactly that point since 77% of the sample were female and reported that they were responsible for household shopping. This point is particularly prevalent with regard to access to cars. In fact over 50% of women in 1991-1993 either lived in households without a car or were non-drivers in a household with a car. Similarly, although there is a rising proportion of women who work they still do most of the shopping and spend twice as much time as men provisioning the household (Piachaud & Webb 18). Ultimately, anything that affects the purchaser also affects the purchasing experience -- in this case physical access to the foodstore. Comparative shopping exercises illustrate the availability and price indices of food and reiterate the price differences between the smaller independents, the local corner shops and the supermarkets. Initial research using the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's "Low Cost, Healthy Diet" (Leather 75) provides evidence of a cost differential of £1.41, or a 26% cost penalty by shopping at a corner store rather than a superstore. Availability among corner shops similarly compared unfavourably with the supermarkets, with the smallest stores offering minimal fresh fruit and vegetables and regularly offering no 'economy' branded equivalent to an established manufacturer's brand. This supports previous research which found that in areas where small shops do exist they offer only a limited overpriced range of processed foods (Elliott 5), and it is generally accepted that those who can shop at supermarkets can generally benefit from lower prices and more choice (Piachaud & Webb 32). The benefits of supermarkets are not therefore available to all. Shopping diaries further illustrate this point with the dichotomy existing where the lower-income consumer shops more frequently and locally than does her higher-income counterpart and it is these same consumers who patronise the smaller, often more expensive corner shop. Many consumers like the convenience of large supermarkets where they have access to a vast range of items and do not mind paying premium prices on some items for this convenience. Supermarkets do not offer low prices on all items, but do stock economy lines as well as premium priced items. The consumer questionnaire provides some quantitative analysis and statistical weight to the data and was analysed using the χ-square test on SPSS for Windows Version 8. With the χ-square test the important detail is the significance level (reported as a p-value). A p-value of less than 0.05 indicates that the two groups are significantly different at a confidence level of 95% -- in other words, it can be concluded that the author is 95% certain that the result is statistically significant and free from error. Four areas of the Province were sampled -- two rural and two urban. The sample was 77% female and the median age group fell between 45 to 54 years. The social class status was skewed towards the lower socio-economic classes and only 12% fell into social classes A or B. The mean household income was £151 to £200 per week. The survey was interviewer-assisted and pointed to some interesting correlations between levels of satisfaction with store location and distance travelled, product choice and the decision to continue shopping in the town centre. Thirty percent of the sample stated that they shop at off-centre complexes and 70% of the sampled households shop in the town centre or closer to home. This sample also provides evidence that shopping is largely a car-borne activity with 58% of the sample using the family car. Journey distance is significantly influenced by degree of satisfaction with locality: p<0.01 and is supported with the evidence that 64% of the respondents stated that they shop less than fifteen minutes from home. Similar relationships exist between reported satisfaction with locality and differing degrees of satisfaction for product choice: p<0.01. A significant bias similarly exists between those who continue to shop in the town centre after the advent of the UK multiples into Northern Ireland in 1996 and those who do not: p<0.05 with a bias towards those continuing to shop in the town centre reporting high satisfaction levels. Ultimately, perceived adequacy of shopping provision influences satisfaction with store locality: p<0.05. Although the majority of respondents' weekly shopping is conducted at a multiple there is still an identified need for the local corner shops and independents since approximately 29% of respondents buy essentials like bread, milk and other basic grocery provision there. In fact, 98% of those surveyed reported that every town centre should have a food store, and 82% noticed a reduction in the number of food stores locally in recent years. In a concluding open question in the survey attitudes towards off-centre supermarkets were gauged. Responses ranged from positive in nature ("better parking facilities") to indifferent ("I never bother with them") to negative ("they [out-of-town supermarkets] only suit people with cars" and "they hurt the small shopkeeper"). From a retail management point of view, the multiple stores perceive (or want the consumer to believe) that they have a "social responsibility" but suggest that it should be a coalition between retailers and councillors to rejuvenate the town centres and it is not their sole responsibility. The corner shops argue their business position has survived but allude to the fact that the migration to out-of-town sites by the supermarkets has "created a void in the town centre". The issue is complex. While it is true that the multiples have brought shoppers a number of benefits -- price, choice and quality -- they have also both directly (siting shops outside town centres and in high income areas) and indirectly (undermining the economies of small, local outlets) increased costs on disadvantaged consumers in terms of time, physical effort and transport. This has led to a degree of social exclusion amongst certain consumer groups, although this was not quantitatively expressed as significant via the medium of the questionnaire in this preliminary study. It should be remembered that food and mealtimes are imbued with social and cultural meaning (Lang 27) and that "food is a vehicle for social control" (7). In fact food desertification has been likened to the "food equivalent of disconnecting the water supply" (27) and initiatives should be considered to alleviate food poverty and rejuvenate town centres throughout the Province. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary with input from retailers, councillors, health promotion personnel and education bodies to bring about a policy to eradicate this form of social exclusion and disadvantage. References Colquhoun, A. "Food Retailing in Transition: Memories of Traditional Grocer Shops in the 1950s." Strugnell and Armstrong. Elliott, V. "Food Deserts Threaten Health of Poor and Old." Sunday Times 5 Nov. 1997: 5. Lang, T. "Running On Empty." Demos Collection 12 (1997). 25-7. ---. "Food Education and the Citizen: Whose Responsibility?" Strugnell and Armstrong 7. Leather, S. "Less Money, Less Choice: Poverty and Diet in the United Kingdom Today". Your Food: Whose Choice? Ed. National Consumer Council. London: HMSO, 1992. 72-94. McGregor, S. "Globalising Consumer Education: Shifting from Individual Consumer Rights to Collective Human Responsibilities." Strugnell and Armstrong 43-52. Murcott, A. "Is It Still a Pleasure to Cook for Him? Social Changes in the Household and the Family." Strugnell and Armstrong 11. Piachaud, D. and J. Webb. The Price of Food: Missing Out on Mass Consumption." London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1996. 32. Strugnell, C. J. "Food Deserts: Fact or Fiction." Nutrition and Food Science 6. MCB UP. 349-50. Strugnell, C.J. and G. A. Armstrong, eds. Consumer Education: An International Dimension. Conference Proceedings of the XIXth International Consumer Studies and Home Economics Research Conference. Belfast: University of Ulster, 1999. Vaines, E. "The Sacred Nature of Food: A Family Perspective" Strugnell and Armstrong 13. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sinead Furey, Heather McIlveen, Christopher Strugnell. "Food Deserts: An Issue of Social Justice." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/deserts.php>. Chicago style: Sinead Furey, Heather McIlveen, Christopher Strugnell, "Food Deserts: An Issue of Social Justice," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/deserts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sinead Furey, Heather McIlveen, Christopher Strugnell. (1999) Food deserts: an issue of social justice. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/deserts.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction For the past ten years, a transformative trend has emerged in the consumption of journalistic content, diverging significantly from its traditional engagement pathways. This evolution is characterised by the allure of serial journalistic podcasts such as Serial, which have seamlessly integrated narrative techniques typically reserved for fiction into journalistic storytelling (Kulkarni et al.). These podcasts have leveraged episodic structures, suspenseful build-ups, and dramatic climaxes to foster a level of engagement akin to fiction's grip on audiences. This shift towards addictive media consumption is eloquently linked to the binge-watching culture of on-demand television described by Dowling and Miller, situating such podcasts within a lineage of high-calibre television narratives (168). The concept of "binge-listening" (Krause and Uhrig 446) has emerged from this trend, signifying a consumption pattern where audiences, particularly those drawn to multi-part serial podcasts in genres like true crime, engage in extended listening sessions or eagerly anticipate new episodes. This pattern, reflective of an excessive indulgence in content, underscores the creators' success in crafting compelling narratives that captivate and retain audience interest. Illustrative of this phenomenon are listener testimonials for Die Mafiaprinzessin, a narrative podcast series by Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine (part of Germany’s major quality newspaper), where users expressed their inability to disengage, consuming the entire series rapidly. One user stated, "I couldn't stop listening", and another, "I binged all episodes in two days" (quoted in Krause and Uhrig 447). But what makes serial storytelling podcasts in Germany so appealing, and which lessons can be drawn from this? This article provides answers through a historical lens and a focus on the creative process, distribution, and the transparency of journalistic research. Incorporating these sources and viewpoints, the discussion provides an overview of the cultural shift in media consumption towards serialised journalistic podcasts, highlighting their role in redefining audience engagement with media content. From Written to Spoken Storytelling Traditions The narrative-driven approach to audio journalism discussed in this article is typically unfolding over five to ten serialised podcast episodes of 30 to 45 minutes each, and diverges from shorter news snippets or dialogue-based formats, tackling complex topics through well-researched and dramatised storytelling. Kelleter defines serial storytelling as the delivery of continuation stories featuring consistent characters, produced and narrated in a mass-appealing, schematic manner (18). This definition, originally pertaining to fiction, aptly describes the serialised journalistic content's approach, emphasising that while the storytelling techniques may mirror fiction, the content remains firmly anchored in journalistic rigour and quality. It is neither based on a true story nor loosely associated with fiction. The podcast series that are the focus of this article are journalism in audio form, dedicated to journalism’s core values. This article aims to shed light on the development, cultural significance, and economic implications of such podcasts in Germany, specifically those produced by publishing houses as part of their digital strategy to gain digital subscriptions and hence turn readers into paying customers. The economic potential of such journalistic storytelling podcasts can be quite significant, as Newman describes in the 2023 Digital News Report: “podcasting may not yet be a mass market medium, but its audience profile is extremely interesting to publishers and to advertisers” (48). Newman continues to describe that podcast audiences generally have higher incomes, are more educated, and, notably, skew towards a younger demographic, making them an attractive demographic for publishers. While it is true that podcasts have achieved mass-market appeal on a global scale, the particular narratives that resonate with individual listeners can be highly specialised and varied, mirroring their diverse interests. This phenomenon is analogous to the realm of print magazines, which as a medium cater to a broad readership. However, individual publications often cater to distinct niches, attracting readers who share a specific set of interests. However, individual publications often target distinct niches, appealing to readers who share a specific set of interests. Podcasts in general appeal to a wide range of ages as a versatile medium, suitable for listening during various activities such as travel to and from work, dog walking, gym sessions, or while engaging in routine household chores like tidying up. Their capacity to build meaningful relationships with the audience is just beginning to be analysed. It has been found that “podcasts can provide informational and social gratifications to listeners” (Tobin and Guadagno 2). First Steps towards Serial Storytelling Podcasts in Germany The surge in serialised storytelling podcasts started shortly after the first season of the NPR podcast Serial in the English-speaking world, and was dubbed the medium’s “Golden Age” (Berry 170). These intricately produced journalistic podcasts became a new avenue for traditional media companies to market their in-depth research beyond print and online articles. And in many ways, this makes a lot of sense: with in-depth investigative research being one of the core values (and yet one of the most time-consuming, sometimes frustrating, and often very expensive assets) of any editorial medium, it makes economic sense to use as many channels as possible to publish the results of this research. In terms of content diversity, podcasts occupy a niche that is similar to what investigative journalism books or documentaries once did as a premium journalistic product where complex stories or investigations can be told in full, without the length constraints of typical journalistic formats (Krause and Uhrig 449). Podcasts have been distributed since 2005, but it took almost a decade for them to break away from the time limitations of linear radio slots. In Germany, serialised podcast storytelling arrived a year after Serial, with the Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg series Wer hat Burak erschossen? (Who Shot Burak?) from 2015, which many consider to be one of the first German podcast series in this new narrative tradition (Preger 7). Since then, the range of podcast series has diversified rapidly in Germany, just like in the US, in terms of both topics and providers. Following the already successful American themes of crime and terrorism, there were soon investigative research stories about topics ranging from the rise and fall of the former German economic powerhouse (and later notoriously fraudulent) Wirecard by Süddeutsche Zeitung or the popular media scandal about the publication of the fake diaries of Adolf Hitler by Stern Magazine in the 1980s, which the publishing house turned into a successful podcast series in 2020. And from 2021 onwards, there was an increase in biographically centred podcasts that combine elements of portraiture with investigative or contemporary historical elements such as the 2022 series Who the F*** Is Alice by Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, elaborating on the controversial work of Germany’s most popular first-generation feminist Alice Schwarzer. Yet, one of the most successful German storytelling podcasts is the episodic tale about the tragic descent of former radio host Ken Jebsen, from beloved (yet edgy) media personality to controversial conspiracy theorist, which was turned into a stunning tale in the series Cui Bono: WTF Happened to Ken Jebsen in 2021 (Eins 37), hitting a nerve in German society in times of Covid and the subsequent rise of populist conspiracy movements. Other notable German storytelling podcasts about prominent figures in Germany include the 2023 Series SchwarzRotGold: Mesut Özil zu Gast bei Freunden, about football player Mesut Özil and his complicated and highly political life story as an immigrant in Germany (published on RTL+), or Wild Wild Web: The Kim Dotcom Story from 2021 about Kim Dotcom, the controversial entrepreneur and founder of the now defunct file-sharing operator Megaupload, by Bayerischer Rundfunk. Specifics of Successful German Storytelling Podcasts While audio journalism has traditionally been a domain of public and private broadcasting companies in Germany, there has been a shift towards podcast productions from a more diverse set of media outlets. Approximately 66% of daily and weekly papers in Germany are currently producing podcasts, with 29% offering at least three different podcast series (Eins 104). This is a trend that is not limited to the big national subscription newspapers but can also be observed in smaller regional and local publications. According to a study by Wild & Wild, at least one third of the 308 regional and local subscription newspapers examined have incorporated podcasts into their offerings. The content of these podcasts primarily focusses on society and social issues (25%) and sports and leisure activities (20%) (175). What makes these podcasts specifically German (in contrast to series from other countries) is hard to answer and would require further research. What can be said, however, is that Germany has a vibrant scene for audio journalism and German audiences are rather familiar with the form of long-form audio reporting through the country's relatively strong public broadcasting system, which has been publishing quite elaborate forms of audio journalism since the 1950s. Even though many statistics and audience engagement metrics remain confidential, it has been written that audience engagement has been very good (Wild and Wild). It is evident that serial podcasts rank among the most successful digital offerings of large national media companies such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, fetching significant digital subscriptions with series like Wer ist Joni? (Who is Joni?), which was selected as one of the best podcasts in 2023 by the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung and was described as follows: Who is Joni? is a podcast about trust on the internet. We've all heard about marriage swindlers or people who extort money online. But Joni's case is different. It's particularly compelling because Christiane Lutz narrates it so personally. She contrasts her research with her own thoughts and feelings. She feels naïve, paranoid, angry, relieved, and all of this is completely relatable to the listener. (Fromm) As described here, the role of the host as the storyteller is paramount. The host serves as a convivial guide, offering subjective but meticulously researched narratives, sometimes paired with a serious sidekick for contrast. A recent study in Journalism Practice suggests that even news journalism benefits from narrative elements (Nee and Santana). Another study highlights two factors that enthral listeners: intimacy and emotion (Lindgren), which are prevalent across all podcast genres, including the often-criticised "chat podcasts" where two hosts discuss daily matters. At least in Germany, they are predominantly male, yet the masculine dominance has been challenged and reflected upon in recent discourse (Attig). These podcasts, which often rank highly on the German podcast charts on platforms such as Spotify, are quite different from the serial storytelling podcasts that many publishing houses see as a new way to engage with journalistic content. Common Ingredients of Successful German Storytelling Podcasts According to Schlütz, several characteristics distinguish narrative journalism as specific to podcasts, among them subjectivity, personalisation, contextualisation, and transparency (10). Building upon these findings, this article looks at various attributes of successful German podcasts from the serial storytelling variety. The selection of these podcasts was driven by their demonstrated popularity, as evidenced by reviews in newspapers, radio shows, or newsletters, as well as their recognition in the form of nominations or receipt of prestigious awards such as the German Reporter Prize and the German Podcast Prize. Such honours imply that these podcasts distinguish themselves by features like captivating storytelling, perceptive journalism, inventive production methods, or other exceptional qualities that have earned the respect and admiration of both their industry peers and listeners. Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that this curated group does not represent an exhaustive overview of Germany's storytelling podcast landscape. The evaluation of the chosen podcasts was based on an analysis of their auditory content and the media's reception of them, including interviews with and reviews of both the podcasts and their creators. From this investigation, three principal insights emerged: Strong host figures who, in many cases, not only guide through the story, but become part of the story themselves. In the Norddeutscher Runkfunk production Eschede – 25 Jahre danach from 2023 (Eschede – 25 years after) the reporter Miriam Arndts researches the tragic accident that occurred in Eschede, Lower Saxony, in 1998, where a high-speed train derailed and collided with a bridge, resulting in the loss of 101 lives. Among the bereaved was Arndts, who lost her mother in the disaster. Making this podcast highly personal, Arndts engages with survivors and relatives of the victims, intertwining their accounts with her personal story, in line with Lindgren’s findings that “the involvement of the journalist (or host) in the story transcends self-reflexive metacommentary on journalistic practice to focus on the journalist as a private person” (10). Suspense and drama are leading elements of many of the successful podcasts: in Frauke Liebs – die Suche nach dem Mörder (Frauke Liebs – the search for the murderer) from the Magazine Stern, host and journalist Dominik Stawski embarks on a mission to solve a crime that he has been following for a good part of his career – addressing the murderer directly over the course of the episodes. This series could only be realised because of the reporter’s deep involvement in the story and his contacts with many of the people involved in the case, including the family of the victim. This is a good example of how such a series can be created from investigations that have already been published, but can now use the advantages of the longer form of serial storytelling in audio. The understanding of topical events and news is deepened by serial podcasts. As has been mentioned by Planer and Godulla, news stories can also be the drivers of in-depth audio storytelling (105). In Germany this can be exemplified by the popular series Die Flut – Warum musste Johanna sterben? (The flood – why did Johanna have to die?) from 2022, whose team of reporters from Westdeutscher Rundfunk investigates the circumstances of the tragic events of the deadly flood of the river Ahr in Germany that lead to many deaths in the summer of 2021. While this event is clearly of journalistic relevance, such tragedies are typically covered only for a short period by traditional news media. This podcast, in contrast, puts a lot of time and effort into trying to understand the consequences of such a natural disaster for those directly affected by it. The producers of the podcast describe their experience like this: During production, tears were shed more than once. And then, it is precisely this directness of emotion that makes the cruelty of the events tangible. It glosses over nothing, hides nothing. It makes the questions of responsibility directed at politicians even more pressing. (Beisenherz) These aspects show that – among others – these elements are recurring themes of storytelling podcasts in Germany. Of course, there are other factors that determine success of podcasts – the production (Preger 233), the distribution (Krause & Uhrig 457), and the marketing (Eins 169) being the most obvious ones. Current Trends and Economic Potential As Eins has pointed out, many leading publishers in Germany, including Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Handelsblatt, have in recent years created digital team positions to manage podcast productions (104). Audio studios have been established within publishing houses. Some editorial teams turn to external service providers, such as Die Zeit working with Pool Artists in Berlin for their podcasts or Süddeutsche Zeitung seeking external expertise for dramaturgy or sound design. The decision to manage podcasts in-house or to hire external providers depends on the available budget, expertise, and the complexity of the project (Eins 105). As Eins has pointed out, simple two-microphone interviews can be self-recorded by amateurs familiar with recording equipment and basic audio editing. However, sophisticated audio features with intricate sound design require teamwork, which is often sought from outside companies. German Media houses increasingly collaborate with external production companies. As podcast market competition grows, distinctive dramaturgy and sound may become crucial, especially for major media brands – this makes collaborations more interesting. For example, Süddeutsche Zeitung has produced elaborate investigative audio features, often in partnership with streaming services. The series Im Schattenkloster (2023/24) about a destructive religious cult in rural Bavaria has been produced in collaboration with Audible, an Amazon company. These podcast series sometimes continue the narrative of previously published investigations and articles in audio form, such as Der Spiegel's Made in Germany – das Flughafenfiasko BER or Going to Ibiza by Süddeutsche Zeitung, or they may be released as exclusive digital content like Narcoland by Aachener Zeitung. The appeal of producing serialised podcasts in an era where digital performance and the attraction of many paying customers to buy digital subscriptions is very important could be attributed to their relatively long production cycle (Krause and Uhrig 456). Unlike topical formats tied to release dates, complex storytelling podcasts retain significance over time in what is known as the Long Tail, described by Anderson, which encapsulated the concept of (digital) products that do not rely on high sales volume from a few mainstream products but achieve sales through a variety of niche products. And the numbers point in this direction: the 2020 podcast series Der Mörder und meine Cousine (The Murderer and My Cousin) produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk registered over 1.2 million plays between June 2020 and January 2022. Of these, 534,000 plays were recorded in the first two months following its release. Over the next 18 months, it garnered an additional 677,973 listens. Even in January 2022, more than 18 months post-release, the monthly play count exceeded 10,000, according to data from the provider's portal Spotify for Podcasters and the internal analysis tool MeFo Charts used by Bayerischer Rundfunk (Krause and Uhrig 457) Conclusion In the landscape of modern journalism in Germany, the advent of serial storytelling through podcasts has carved out a novel niche for high-quality narrative forms. Their appeal lies significantly in their adaptability, which has seen their popularity skyrocket and has made them an important asset in the sales strategy of digital subscriptions for publishing houses (Eins 106). By leveraging the power of audio, these formats not only captivate new demographics but also play a crucial role in shaping journalistic identities, presenting narratives in ways that resonate with the changing consumption patterns of listeners. These narratives, designed for on-the-go consumption, echo the episodic consumption trends set by intricate television and streaming shows, seamlessly fitting into the listener's lifestyle. Journalistically, these podcast series offer a compelling twist on storytelling (Krause and Uhrig 459), often expanding beyond traditional broadcast journalism principles to explore deeper, more intricate narratives, marking an exciting evolution in the way stories are told and consumed. This article has pointed out three aspects that storytelling podcasts in Germany have in common: strong host figures, suspense and drama, and a relation to current news and events, building bridges between classic news reporting and storytelling techniques exemplified by this article. It remains to be seen how these trends evolve in the future: the trend towards audio is described by the current Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al. 28) as “help[ing to] build loyal relationships, and ... good at attracting younger audiences”. Nevertheless, and despite all positive opportunities, there are of course limiting factors, such as the relatively high costs and long production cycles of such series, which require further investigation. References Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion, 2008. Attig, Christiane. "Männlich, Mittelalt, Gebildet – oder? Eine Charakterisierung deutschsprachiger Podcaster:Innen". Kommunikation@gesellschaft 21.2 (2020). Beisenherz, C. "Die Flut—Warum musste Johanna sterben?" 19 June 2023. <https://www1.wdr.de/podcast/die-flut-100.html>. Berry, Richard. "A Golden Age of Podcasting? Evaluating Serial in the Context of Podcast Histories." Journal of Radio & Audio Media 22.2 (2015): 170-178. Dowling, D.O., and K.J. Miller. "Immersive Audio Storytelling: Podcasting and Serial Documentary in the Digital Publishing Industry." Journal of Radio & Audio Media 26.1 (2019): 167-184. Eins, P. Podcasts im Journalismus: Eine Einführung für die Praxis. Springer Fachmedien, 2022. Fromm, A. "Recherche-Podcast ‘Wer ist Joni?’: Das einsame Mädchen." Die Tageszeitung, 22 Jan. 2023. <https://taz.de/!5907468/>. Kelleter, F. Populäre Serialität: Eine Einführung. Transcript Verlag, 2012. Krause, T., and K. Uhrig. "Journalismus zum Bingen: Potenziale und Funktionen serieller Podcasts für das digitale Storytelling." In Podcasts, eds. V. Katzenberger, J. Keil, and M. Wild. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2022. 445-460. Kulkarni, S., et al. "Innovating Online Journalism: New Ways of Storytelling." Journalism Practice 17.9 (2023): 845-1863. Lindgren, M. "Intimacy and Emotions in Podcast Journalism: A Study of Award-Winning Australian and British Podcasts." Journalism Practice 17.4 (2023): 704-719. Nee, R.C., and A.D. Santana. "Podcasting the Pandemic: Exploring Storytelling Formats and Shifting Journalistic Norms in News Podcasts Related to the Coronavirus." Journalism Practice 16.8 (2022) 1559-1577. Newman, N. "News Podcasts: Who Is Listening and What Formats Are Working?" In Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023, eds. N. Newman et al. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2023. 48-52. Planer, R., and A. Godulla. "Storytelling in Podcasts deutscher Medienhäuser: Echte Interaktion, geplante Spontanität." In Podcasts, eds. V. Katzenberger, J. Keil, and M. Wild. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2022. 101-118. Preger, S. Geschichten erzählen: Storytelling für Radio und Podcast. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2019. Schlütz, D. "Auditive ‘Deep Dives’: Podcasts als narrativer Journalismus." Kommunikation@gesellschaft 21.2 (2020). Tobin, S.J., and R.E. Guadagno. "Why People Listen: Motivations and Outcomes of Podcast Listening." PLOS ONE 17.4 (2022). Wild, M., and T. Wild. "Vermessung der Podcastlandschaft: Eine explorative Analyse der Podcastangebote der Lokal- und Regionalzeitungen in Deutschland." In Podcasts: Perspektiven und Potenziale eines digitalen Mediums, eds. V. Katzenberger, J. Keil, and M. Wild. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2022. 153-179.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

IntroductionNordic mythology, also known as Norse mythology, is a term used to describe Medieval creation myths and tales of Gods and otherworldly realms, told and retold by Northern Germanic and Scandinavian tribes of the ninth century AD (see for example Gaiman).I discuss a new type of Nordic mythology that is being created through popular culture, social media, books, and television shows. I am interested in how contemporary portrayals of the Nordic countries has created a kind of mythological place called Scandinavia, where things, people, and ideas are better than in other places.Whereas the old myths portray a fierce warrior race, the new myths create a utopian Scandinavia as a place that is inherently good; a place that is progressive and harmonious. In the creation of these new myths the underbelly of the North is often neglected, producing a homogenised representation of a group of countries that are in actuality diverse and inevitably imperfect.ScandimaniaGenerally the term Scandinavia always refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. When including Finland and Iceland, it is more accurate to refer to the five as the Nordic countries. I was born and grew up in Denmark. My observations are skewed towards a focus on Denmark, rather than Scandinavia as a whole. Though I will use the term Nordic and Scandinavia throughout the article, it is worth noting that these definitions describe a group of countries that despite some commonalities are also quite different in geography, and culture.Whether we are speaking strictly of Scandinavia or of the Nordic countries as a whole, one thing is certain: in recent years there has been a surge of popularity in all things Nordic. Scandinavian design has been popular since the 1950s, known for its functionality and simplistic beauty, and globalised through the Swedish furniture chain IKEA. Consequently, Nordic interior design has become a style widely praised and emulated, as has Nordic fashion, architecture, and innovation.The fact that Scandinavian people are often represented as being intelligent and beautiful adds to the notion of stylish and aesthetically pleasing ideals. This is partly why sperm from Danish sperm donors is the most sought after and widely distributed in the world: perhaps prospective parents find the idea of having a baby of Viking stock appealing (Kale). Nordic countries are also known for their egalitarian societies, which are described as “the holy grail of a healthy economy and society” (Cleary). These are countries where the collective good is cherished. Tax rates are high (in Denmark between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of income), which leads to excellent welfare systems.In recent years other terms have entered the collective Western vocabulary. New Nordic Cuisine describes a trend that has taken the culinary world by storm. This term refers to food that is created with seasonal, local, and foraged ingredients. The emphasis being a renewed connection to nature and old ways. In 2016 the Danish word hygge was shortlisted by the Oxford Dictionary as word of the year. A word, which has no direct English translation, it means “a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture)”. Countless books were published in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, explaining the art of hygge. Other Scandinavian words are now becoming popular, such as the Swedish lagom, meaning “just enough”.In the past two years, the United Nations’ World Happiness Report listed Denmark and Norway as the happiest places on earth. Other surveys similarly put the Nordic countries on top as the most prosperous places on earth (Anderson).Mythologies and Discursive FormationsThe standard definition of myth is a “traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” Or “A widely held but false belief or idea” (Oxford Dictionaries, Myth).During what became known as the “discursive turn”, both Barthes and Foucault expanded the conception of myth by placing it within a wider socio-political and historical contexts of power and truth. “Discursive formations” became a commonly accepted way of describing a cluster of ideas, images, and practices that define particular “truths” within a given cultural context (Hall 6). In other words, myths serve specific purposes within given socio-cultural constructions.I argue that the current idolisation of Scandinavia is creating a common global narrative of a superior society. A mythical place that has “figured it out”, and found the key to happiness. The mythologised North is based on an array of media stories, statistics, reports, articles, advertising, political rhetoric, books, films, TV series, exhibitions, and social media activity. These perpetuate a “truth” of the Nordic countries as being especially benign, cultured, and distinguished. The Smiling PolicemanIn his well-known essay Myth Today, Barthes analyses an image of a North African boy in uniform saluting the French flag on the front cover of a magazine. Barthes argues that by analysing the semiotic meaning of the image in two stages, one can identify the “myth”.The first level is the signifiers (what we see), a dark skinned boy, a uniform, a raised arm, a flag. The signified is our recognition of these as a North African boy raising his arm to the French flag. The second level of interpretation is the wider context in which we understand what we see: the greatness of France is signified in the depiction of one of her colonial subjects submitting to and glorifying the flag. That is to say, the myth generated by the image is the story of France as a great colonial and military nation.Now take a look at this image, which was distributed the world over in newspapers, online media, and in turn social media (Warren; Kolff). This image is interesting because it epitomises much of what is believed about Scandinavia (the new myths). If we approach the image through the semiotic lens of Barthes, we firstly describe what is seen in the picture (signifiers): a blonde policeman, a girl of dark complexion, a road in the countryside, a van in the distance, and some other people with backpacks on the side of the road. When we put these elements together in context, we understand that the image to be depicting a Danish policeman, blonde, smiling and handsome, playing with a Syrian refugee girl on an empty Danish highway, with her fellow refugees behind her.The second level of interpretation (the myth) is created by combining the elements into a story: A friendly police officer is playing with a refugee girl, which is unusual because policemen are commonly seen as authoritarian and unfriendly to illegal immigrants. This policeman is smiling. He is happy in his job. He is healthy, good-looking, and compassionate.This fits the image of Scandinavian men as good fathers (they have paternity leave, and often help equally with child rearing). The image confirms that the happiest people on earth would of course also have happy, friendly policemen. The belief that the Scandinavian social model is one to admire would appear to be endorsed.The fact that this is in a rural setting with green landscapes adds further to the notion of Nordic freshness, naturalness, environmentalism, and food that comes from the wild. The fact that the policeman is well-groomed, stylish, well-built, and handsome reinforces the notion that Scandinavia is a place of style and taste, where the good Viking gene pool produces fit and beautiful people.It makes sense that in a place with a focus on togetherness and the common good, refugees are also treated well. Just as the French image of a dark-skinned boy saluting the French flag sent out messages of French superiority, this image sends out messages of inherent Nordic goodness in a time where positive images of the European refugee crisis are few and far between.In a discursive discussion, one asks not only what meanings does this image convey, but why is this image chosen, distributed, shared, tweeted, and promoted over other images? What purpose does its proliferation serve? What is the historical context in which it is popularised? What is the cultural imagination/narrative that is served? In the current often depressing socio-political situation in Europe, people like to know that there is a place where compassion and play exists.Among other news stories of death, despair, and border protection, depictions of an idealised North can help calm anxieties by implying the existence of a place that is free of conflict. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen writes:The flood of journalistic and popular ethnographic explorations of the Nordic region in the UK is an expression, perhaps, of a search for a lost sense of identity, a nostalgic longing for an imagined past society more in tune with pre-Thatcherite welfarist values, by way of consuming, appropriating and exoticising proximate cultural identities such as the now much hyped Danish or Nordic utopias. (Nordic Noir, 6)In The Almost Nearly Perfect People, British writer Michael Booth wonders: “one thing in particular about this new-found love of all things Scandinavian … which struck me as particularly odd: considering all this positive PR, and with awareness of the so-called Nordic miracle at an all-time high, why wasn’t everyone flocking to live here [in Denmark]?” (7).In actuality not many people in the West are interested in living in the Nordic countries. Rather, as Barbara Goodwin writes: “utopias hold up a mirror to the fears and aspirations of the time in which they were written” (2). In other words, in an age of anxiety, where traditional norms and stabilities are shifting, to believe that there is a place where contemporary societies have found a way of living in happiness and togetherness provides a sense of hope. People are not flocking to live in Scandinavia because it is not in their interests to have their utopian ideals shattered by the reality that, though the North has a lot to offer, it is inevitably not a utopia (Sougaard-Nielsen, The Truth Is).UnderbellyParadoxically, in recent years, Scandinavia has become well known for its “Nordic Noir” crime fiction and television. In the documentary TV series Scandimania, British TV personality Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall travels through Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, exploring the culture, scenery, and food. He finds it curious that Denmark has become so famous for its sombre crime series, such as The Killing and The Bridge, because it seems so far removed from the Denmark he experiences riding around the streets of Copenhagen on his bike.Fearnley-Whittingstall ponders that one has to look hard to find the dark side of Denmark, and that perhaps it does not actually exist at all. This observation points to something essential. Even though millions of viewers worldwide have seen shows such as The Killing, which are known for their dark story lines, bleak urban settings, complex but realistic characters, progressive gender equality, and social commentary, the positive mythologising of Scandinavia remains so strong that it engenders a belief that the underbelly shown in Nordic Noir is perhaps entirely fictional.Stougaard-Nielsen (see also Pitcher, Consuming Race) argues that perhaps the British obsession with Nordic Noir (and this could be applied to other western countries) can be attributed to “a more appropriate white cosmopolitan desire to imagine rooted identities in an age of globalisation steeped in complex identity politics” (Nordic Noir, 8). That is to say that, for a segment of society which feels overwhelmed by contemporary multiculturalism, there may be a pleasure in watching a show that is predominantly populated by white Nordic protagonists, where the homes and people are stylish, and where the Nordic model of welfare and progressive thinking provides a rich identity source for white people as a symbolic point of origin.The watching/reading of Nordic Noir, as well as other preoccupations with all things Nordic, help build upon a mythological sense of whiteness that sets itself apart from our usual notions of race politics, by being an accepted form of longing for the North of bygone ages: a place that is progressive, moral, stylish, and imbued with aspirational ways of living, thinking, and being (Pitcher, Racial Politics).The image of the Danish police officer and the refugee girl fits this ideal of a progressive society where race relations are uncomplicated. The policeman who epitomises the Nordic ideal is in a position of power, but this is an authority which is benevolent. The girl is non-threatening in her otherness, because she is a child and female, and therefore does not fit the culturally dreaded Muslim/terrorist stereotype. In this constellation the two can meet beautifully.The reality, of course, is that the race relations and issues surrounding immigration in Denmark, and in other Nordic countries, are as complicated and often messy and hateful as they are in other countries. In Sweden, as Fearnley-Whittingstall touches upon in Scandimania, there are escalating problems with integration of the many new Swedes and growing inequalities in wealth. In Norway, the underlying race tensions became acutely topical in the aftermath of the 2011 massacre, where right-wing extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people. Denmark has one of the harshest anti-immigration laws in Europe, laws that are continuously being tightened (Boserup); and whenever visiting Denmark I have been surprised to see how much space and time discussions about immigration and integration take up in the news and current affairs.If we contrast the previous image with the image above, taken within a similar timeframe on the same Danish highway, we can see the reality of Danish immigration policies. Here we are exposed to a different story. The scene and the location is the same, but the power dynamics have shifted from benign, peaceful, and playful to aggressive, authoritarian, and conflict ridden. A desperate father carries his daughter, determined to march on towards their destination of Sweden. The policeman is pulling his arm, attempting to detain the refugees so that they cannot go further, the goal being to deport the Syrians back to their previous place of detention, just over the border in Germany (Harticollis). While the previous image reflects the humanity of the refugee crisis, this image reflects the politics, policies, and to a large extent public opinion in Denmark, which is not refugee-friendly. This image, however, was not widely distributed, partly because it feeds into the same depressing narrative of an unsolvable refugee crisis seen so often elsewhere, and partly because it does not fit into the narrative of the infallible North. It could not be tweeted with the hashtag #Humanity, nor shared on Facebook with a smiley face and liked with an emoji heart.Another image from Denmark, in the form of a politically funded billboard, shows that there are deep-seated tendencies within Danish society that want to promote and retain a Denmark which adheres to its traditional values and ethnic whiteness. The image was displayed all over the country, at train stations, bus stops, and other public spaces when I visited in 2016. It was issued by Dansk Folkeparti (the Danish People’s Party); a party which is anti-immigration and which was until recently the country’s second largest party. The title says “Our Denmark”, while the byline cleverly plays with the double meaning of passe på: it can mean “there is so much we need to take care of”, but also “there is so much we need to beware of.” In other words, the white working-class family needs to take care of their Denmark, and beware of anyone who does not fit into this norm. Though hugely contested and criticised (Cremer; see a counter-reaction designed by opponents below), the fact that thinly veiled anti-immigration propaganda can be so readily distributed speaks of an underbelly in Danish society that is not made of the dark murder mysteries in The Killing, but rather of a quietly brewing distain for the foreigner that reigns within stylishly designed living rooms. ConclusionMyths are stories cultures tell and retell until they form a belief system that becomes a natural part of our collective narrative. For Barthes, these stories were intrinsically connected to our understanding of language and our ability to read images, films, artifacts, and popular culture more generally. To later cultural theorists, the notion of discursive formations expands this understanding, to see myth within a broader network of socio-political discourses placed within a certain place and time in history. When connected, small narratives (images, advertising, film, music, news stories, social media sharing, scientific evidence, etc.) come together to form a common narrative (the myth) about how things are and should be in relation to a particular topic. The culminating popularity of numerous Nordic themes (Nordic television/film, interior design, fashion, cuisine, architecture, lifestyle, sustainability, welfare system, school system, gender equality, etc.) has created a grand narrative of the Nordic countries as a type of utopia: one that shows the rest of the world that an egalitarian society of togetherness and progressive innovation is possible. This mythologisation serves to quell anxieties about the flux and uncertainty of contemporary times, and may also serve to legitimise a yearning for a simple, benign, and progressive whiteness, where we imagine Nordic families sitting peacefully at their beechwood dining tables, candles lit, playing board games. 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