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Through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century, this book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as having always dominated global film culture.

Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, bringing it all vividly to life.

Making ground-breaking use of digitized Australian and New Zealand newspapers, the author reconstructs the distribution and exhibition of European silent films in the Antipodes, along the way incorporating compelling biographical sketches of the ambitious pioneers of the Australasian cinema industry. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

While nation-branding campaigns have become a popular means for governments to attempt to improve their country's standing on international indexes, such as the Anholt-Gfk Roper Nation Brand Index (NBI), the generally static ranking on such indexes suggests that national brands cannot simply be shaped by clever marketing campaigns. Instead, national brands rest on deeply rooted perceptions of a country's character and identity, which often have much in common with popular stereotypes about the country. This article analyzes how several advertising campaigns in Germany and Denmark, sponsored by both governmental entities and private corporations, explicitly engage with and manipulate positive national stereotypes in order to shape public narratives about what their countries have to offer the world.

The tendency of 20th century French and German philosophers to claim S?ren Kierkegaard as the ?Father of Existentialism? has largely obscured not only Kierkegaard?s Danish identity but also the influential, though oblique, role he played in mid-19th century Danish society and politics. Although many of the pseudonymous texts from his early period offer veiled satirical critiques of particular individuals and institutions in Danish society, Kierkegaard?s final literary accomplishment, the series of articles known collectively as the ?Attack on Christendom? (1854-55), presents his most sweeping indictment of Danish society, a critique of the unity of state and church that had been an integral part of Denmark?s political structure for nearly a thousand years. The death and subsequent hagiographic treatment of Bishop J.P. Mynster is generally identified as having provided the impetus for Kierkegaard?s diatribe, but it is no coincidence that his work appeared just a few years after the establishment of religious freedom in Article 81 of the June Constitution of 1849. However, scholars have been slow to make the connection between Kierkegaard?s brilliantly insightful and stylistically masterful last work and the societal upheaval that both gave rise to and followed the granting of this fundamental civil right. In this paper, I examine Kierkegaard?s evolving view of the governmental regulation of religious belief and practice, both as it impinges upon his personal life and as it manifests itself in his literary texts, particularly, but not exclusively, the ?Attack on Christendom.? Far from being an ivory-tower intellectual with little interest in or contact with the common people of Denmark, Kierkegaard was passionately invested in the temporal and spiritual affairs of his countrymen and he used his literary talents to challenge both establishment practices and received truths. While his contributions to existentialist philosophy are undeniably important, his legacy of using literature to critique and reshape social norms is equally significant.