Mapping the Source of the Hyperreal: Re-evaluating the Emergence of Hyperreality

Hyperreality now colonises so much of the twenty-first century, from politics to coffee flavours in Starbucks. It has become a powerful and ubiquitous force. This thesis argues that hyperreality is a saturating and commonplace force that needs to be explored, properly defined and its origins discovered. Hyperreality has evolved from its influential definitions in Baudrillard’s Simulations, first published in English in 1983. This work argues that the academic landscape examining the hyperreal has not; the theory is in a rut. In searching for the source of the hyperreal, this thesis maps the source by looking at consumer magazines working backwards from 1983 to the publication of the English periodical The Athenian Mercury in 1691. It progresses the academic landscape and understanding of the hyperreal by effectively looking backwards in order to advance. It concludes that the source of the hyperreal is not to be found in one place, such as Baudrillard’s postmodernity. The research does two things: it unshackles hyperreality from Baudrillard’s assumed paternity to demonstrate that Baudrillard did not “invent” hyperreality, but rather that he named a process that was already too prevalent to ignore. In every chapter this thesis also proves that hyperreality was functioning before the postmodern period of the late twentieth century. Consumer magazines represent the key object of study beginning in the 1980s with the surge of publications on the subject of the royal wedding. This chapter works backwards using key time jumps from this much-discussed moment to analyse the construction of related hyperreality in The Ladies’ Home Journal. From the 1950s, the second chapter moves to the film fan magazines of the 1920s, which saw film stars fusing with consumer culture in a compelling constellation of the hyperreal. This gendered process is then investigated at a much earlier date, the late nineteenth century, via The Women at Home before following the reverse chronology to the early 1800s with The Gentleman’s Magazine and The Penny Magazine to interrogate and contextualise the imperial processes that underpin the hyperreal. The final chapter zeroes in on a very specific case study, Richard Steele’s “Woman of Quality” that appeared in The Spectator in 1711, in order to map the threads of influence from a singular point and provide evidence of the hyperreal at work at such an early point in the timeline. These time jumps end with The Athenian Mercury of 1691 as exemplifying the early operation of hyperreality. This thesis examines and evaluates how hyperreality works and how it interacts with aspects of gender, power, and consumer culture. The conclusion argues that the source of the hyperreal is not one moment or one event, but rather a process that Joseph Addison writing in The Spectator magazine of 1711 identifies as the ‘Traffick of Mankind’. Hyperreality, the thesis concludes, is man-made and, in its Anglo-American form, dates back at least as far as the seventeenth century.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Reeves, Leander

Contributors dc:contributor

• Steenberg, Lindsay
• Mount, Harry

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/hzrv-ne35

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:661b114c-a957-4488-8a8f-0fc969d95b5c:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1