To Örebro University

We study the marketing of radioactive products in Sweden from 1910 to 1940, using a dataset of newspaper and magazine advertisements. We use multimodal critical discourse analysis to show how marketers harnessed the meaning potentials of language and semiotic resources to embed radium in discourses of science and technological development, and thus convince consumers of its health benefits. We find that canny marketers continuously colonized, shaped, and remarketed radioactive products in response to greater scientific knowledge and growing safety concerns. These techniques highlight the challenges of distinguishing legitimate/illegitimate applications of discoveries when science and entrepreneurialism move at the same pace.

In our community, girls do not need this [English-medium education].Interview with male teacherNepal is classified as a low-middle income country (World Bank, 2023), and like other such countries, it is under international pressure to attain gender equality targets in order to receive international aid. However, Nepal is also permeated by widespread perceptions that girls are subordinate to boys, which influences girls' access to education, information, health and the labour market (Upadhaya & Sah, 2019). Women face restrictions in terms of their basic ability to 'independently venture outside the household, maintain the privacy of their bank accounts, use mobile phones, or become employed' (Karki & Mix, 2022: 413). Illiteracy disproportionately affects females, with 58.95% of illiterates being women and girls (UNESCO, 2021). Notwithstanding this, recent years have seen some progress in enhancing gender equality in Nepal, and females currently enjoy higher enrolment rates than males across secondary education (UNESCO, 2023). This article, however, provides evidence that the recent trend to offer English-medium education risks setting back progress made by creating a gender-differentiated system that could yield different outcomes for boys and girls and potentially restrict girls' future trajectories post school and contribute to broader gender inequality in society.

Read the above lines and you’d be forgiven for thinking that they came from one of Quentin Blake’s nonsense verses or a lost Dr Seuss book (minus the rhymes!). In fact, they are taken from Behind the Night-light, a 1912 book that captures the poetic musings of a three-year-old girl, Joan Maude. Back in December of last year, I shone a spotlight on another Edwardian child star: Daisy Ashford and her successful novel The Young Visiters. Like The Young Visiters, Behind the Night-light was also a bestseller in its day, only to have faded into obscurity over time. I’d like take the blog space this week to acquaint unfamiliar readers with this delightful and forgotten book.

Most of us have dusty, old books tucked away in our attics, cupboards or garages that once belonged to our parents, grandparents or distant relatives. These books are an unexpected and useful resource for carrying out genealogical research. Inscriptions provide us with the names and addresses of unknown ancestors, or they can also offer personal information not found elsewhere about their daily lives and hobbies.

This study uses three examples of Edwardian (1901-1914) book inscriptions- a prize inscription, gift inscription, and bookplate-to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach, in which choices of image, color, typography, and materiality are grounded in archival research, can strengthen multimodal analysis. Furthermore, it argues that, while book inscriptions may seem insignificant markers of ownership, they, in fact, act as a material microcosm of many of the social tensions that existed between class groups in early twentieth-century Britain. The analysis reveals that inscriptions were primarily used to objectify their owners’ economic means and cultural necessities, and assert themselves in a social space, whether to uphold their rank or keep their distance from other groups. These findings demonstrate the importance of embedding hypotheses concerning the function and form of artifacts in concrete historical documents.

This study brings together two neglected fields of research—the writing of ordinary people and the materiality of schooling—to explore the representation of gender in a British girls’ school exercise book from the early twentieth century. The exercise book belonged to my great-grandmother, Violet Haynes, who attended Hannah More Girls’ School in St Philips, Bristol from 1907 to 1919. The pupils of Hannah More Girls’ School were predominantly working class and came from the surrounding districts of Easton, Eastville, and St Jude’s, impoverished areas characterised by their insalubrious and crime-infested slums (Smith 7). The school exercise book is an example of what Jennifer Sinor calls “ordinary writing”—that is, “writing that is typically unseen or ignored and is primarily defined by its status as discardable” (5). Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall (170) argue that ordinary writing from England’s past represents “an elusive quarry” in which only the writing of the elite or distinctive educated individuals has survived in archives, libraries, and personal collections. Thus, using a working-class exercise book to study ordinary writing is powerful, as it represents one of the few remaining tangible resources for exploring the life of working-class girls in post-Edwardian Britain. Furthermore, emphasising a working-class girl’s experience offers a new perspective on schooling in the early twentieth century, given that most historical accounts tend to concentrate predominantly on the experiences of men (Johnson; Simon; Silver), use language that hides or marginalizes the presence of girls (Hunt) or focus overwhelmingly on middle-class girls (Burstyn; Hobsbawm; Hunt). This research aims to redress the stereotype that girls were passive recipients of information, and demonstrate that, in fact, the board school encouraged working-class girls to play an active role in their educative experience and to negotiate their female identity in light of the New Woman movement.

For the past month, I have been helping to catalogue the Janet Powney Collection in Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives. Having worked extensively with the collection as part of my PhD research, I was very excited to have the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the wonderful Victorian and Edwardian children’s books that it comprises. As I sifted through the familiar colourful volumes with their decorative lettering and pictorial cloth covers, enjoying the pleasant scent unique to old books, I felt like I was reencountering old friends. That was until I came across an intruder, a strange trespasser that seemed out of place in a collection largely made up of religious novels that were given as prize books to the working-class children of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

As a scholar of book inscriptions, what really frustrates me is when a mark of ownership has been thoughtlessly removed from a book. Often, all that is left is a jagged tear line acting as evidence of the bookplate or prize sticker that once was affixed to the endpapers. This careless act of erasure silences voices of past generations and with them, a wide range of social networks, thoughts and feelings that offer new perspectives on life in a particular time period and sociocultural context.

From the #metoo campaign to the gender pay gap, in recent months, the topic of gender inequality has seldom been out of the headlines. Since the early twentieth century, bolstered by the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union, women in Britain have been fighting for equal rights and opportunities. While images of imprisoned suffragettes on hunger strike or members of the Women’s Liberation Movement burning bras are ingrained in our minds as early examples of the struggle against gender inequality, there is one form of historical discrimination that remains largely forgotten, despite the fact that it is still prevalent in our society today: the giving of books as gifts and prizes. The full extent of this highly gendered practice only became apparent to me through a delve into the Janet Powney Collection at Special Collections and Archives.

In 1912, the British government introduced a Home Rule Bill to Parliament, proposing that Ireland be granted the right to self-govern. This Bill provoked widespread outrage in the Ulster province of Ireland, where most people were Protestant and felt strongly in support of the Union. To express their opposition to Home Rule, Ulster Unionists produced propaganda postcards to convince fellow Irish citizens, the British government and the British public of their cause. This paper analyses six examples of anti-Home Rule picture postcards produced by Ulster Unionists in Belfast between 1912 and 1914. It groups them into six themes – British patriotism; Ulster loyalism; Protestantism; Violence; Mockery of Irish Nationalists; and Comic relief – and uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the ideologies and messages promoted by their iconography. It concludes that, while these postcards aimed to show Ulster as united in its common objective of stopping the Home Rule Bill, their broad range of rhetoric and semiotic resources, in fact, reflects the lack of political consensus across the province and forecasts some of the troubles to come. Nonetheless, it asserts that, despite their contradictions, their hugely emotive power, coupled with other propaganda resources, was successful at drawing attention to Ulster’s cause and putting the province into the spotlight.

This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on a planned physical exhibition—Prize Books and Politics: Rethinking Working-Class Life in Edwardian Britain—and the experience of transforming it into a digital exhibition through the platform of Instagram. Using feedback from visitors in the form of likes, comments and surveys, I reflect on the exhibition in terms of its scope, content, visitor experience and overall success. I also outline the various potentials, constraints and opportunities of Instagram as an exhibition space and put forward recommendations on how it can be used to best advantage not as a replacement for physical exhibitions, but rather as a complement that can attract new audiences, capture real-time feedback and, thus, add multiple voices and stories to museum objects.

The battle jacket—a sleeveless denim jacket customized with band patches—is a staple item of clothing for heavy metal fans. This paper brings together social semiotic analysis and ethnographic insights to explore three different types of battle jacket: the “classic” jacket, the “tribute” jacket, and the “modern” jacket. It discovers that, despite the jacket’s assortment of bold images, colours, typography, and symmetrical arrangements, owners, in fact, consider aesthetics as secondary to the jacket’s function as a “channeler” of memories, relationships, beliefs, and ideologies. For each owner, the jacket serves a unique purpose, whether acting as a biography of their musical life (“classic” jacket), representing social ties and connections with loved ones (“tribute” jacket), or promoting particular political and religious beliefs (“modern” jacket). Through a multimodal ethnographic approach, battle jackets are revealed to be sophisticated and multifaceted artefacts with a range of sociocultural functions embedded in a rich history.

Like most investigatory projects, it started with a serendipitous encounter. I was using the Janet Powney collection in Special Collections and Archives back in January 2016 as part of my PhD project on Edwardian book inscriptions, when I came across a real gem: a beautiful dark brown cloth pocket book published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in 1879 and entitled The Birthday Record – A Daily Remembrancer. As I opened the book, I came across page after page of fascinating inscriptions, through which the owner had documented key moments in his life, leaving a visible trace of an absent presence that echoes through to modern day.

In the nineteenth century, Britain was the epicentre of pen-making, with around 75% of the world’s dip pens being manufactured in Birmingham. While the ownership of dip pens was initially restricted to upper-class Victorians due to their expensive cost, the introduction of mass-production techniques and the 1870 Education Act led to their adoption by the lower classes. The democratisation of the dip pen offered manufacturers an attractive new opportunity to capitalise on Britain’s deeply rooted class structure and use the pen as a strategy of distinction. This paper explores how dip pens, inkwells and blotters became marketed by manufacturers in ways that tapped into collective consciousness on social status, power and one’s sense of limitations, thus reinforcing class divisions. In doing so, it uses Bourdieu’s notion that personal possessions are the ‘practical affirmation of an inevitable difference’ and become the coordinating frame within which social life is grouped. This paper also investigates how Englishness, the notion of Empire and nationalism were used to sell pens abroad. It determines that pen manufacturers were able to build a highly lucrative trade through the exploitation of the ‘social conditioning’ of consumers on class and national identity.

People were already queuing in their hordes when I arrived at the UWE Exhibition and Conference Centre early on Saturday morning. Some with notepads and pens, some with cameras, some with flasks and packed lunches, some even with camping chairs. “I just can’t wait to see him in the flesh,” one woman exclaimed as I made my way to the entrance. No, we weren’t at a concert awaiting the arrival of Ed Sheeran or Drake; we were at the Family History Show, the biggest genealogical event in the South West of England, where dozens of avid amateur researchers had braved the rain to talk to experts in genealogy.

When asked why I have dedicated the last ten years of my life to investigating book inscriptions, I always answer with the same response. No, it is not because I am an admirer of old handwriting (although I am!) or even that I am nosy (well, maybe there is an element of that!); rather, it is I am fascinated by the fact that they act as thousands of threads which, together, weave the tapestries of life. Book inscriptions have an ability to stop time, to bring an emotional immediacy to the people who once walked this earth, to transform the book from a commercial object into a personalised item that forms the life soul of families…

Phil Lynott, the lead singer of the rock band Thin Lizzy, was a complex character. An illegitimate black child who grew up in a working-class, Catholic district of Dublin, Ireland in the 1950s, Lynott spent his life searching for a sense of belonging, something which he explored through rock and roll. This study uses Lynott’s song lyrics to investigate his quest for identity. In particular, it identifies the many recurring themes and archetypes in his music that offered multifaceted self-portraits of his internal conflict between being black, Irish, illegitimate, a rockstar, a Lothario, a son, a father, and a husband, all at the same time.

While one cannot deny that electronic books have brought a host of benefits to readers, there is one thing that they cannot do: trace the life history of the people who owned them. Electronic books lack that human flawed quality that comes with physical copies, whether that be their highlighted words, creased spines or folded page corners. But even more importantly, they lack the material presence of the owner, that emotional immediacy, the ability to be inscribed.

This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate’s structure. The case study reveals that bookplate designs were primarily influenced by the social status and wealth of owners, as well as the specific, well-established norms of the bookplate genre. It also highlights the significance of connecting semiotic choices to the traditions of Edwardian society and the ways in which meanings can shift over time. The findings demonstrate the importance of grounding hypotheses concerning the function and form of artefacts in concrete historical documents, in addition to the vast potential of this methodology for exploring other texts within a particular historical period.

In 1798, statistician John Rickman wrote an article stressing the need to conduct a census in Britain. He argued that “the intimate knowledge of any country must form the rational basis of legislation and diplomacy” and “an industrious population is the basic power and resource of any nation, and therefore its size needs to be known.” Two years later, the Census Act was passed in Parliament and in 1801, the first ever detailed, national survey was carried out. Since this date, a census has been conducted in Britain every ten years.

The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade, first published in 1861, was a bestseller of the Victorian era. Critically acclaimed as one of the greatest historical novels in English, it tells the story of Gerard Eliason and his struggle to balance obligations to his family and the Church. So, when cataloguing the 1906 Collins Clear-Type Press edition held in the Janet Powney Collection, I was more than a bit surprised to discover a series of handwritten satanic references written within.

Aims: In the UK, nicotine pouches are growing in popularity, particularly among young people. This study investigated the Instagram marketing strategies of one leading brand, Nordic Spirit.

Methods: A total of 496 Instagram posts published by Nordic Spirit between 2019 and 2023 were collected and organised into themes using qualitative content analysis to identify recurring patterns. Then, multimodal critical discourse analysis was employed to explore the different linguistic and other semiotic resources at work in posts, their ideological patterns and how they work together to frame nicotine pouches as an essential product for young people.

Results: The study identified four key messages that Nordic Spirit uses to target young people: (1) fun and freedom; (2) Nordic happiness; (3) fuss-free and discreet; and (4) healthy and scientifically rational. It found that posts are often misleading, underplay the dangers of nicotine and frame nicotine pouches as trendy lifestyle products rather than as smoking alternatives.

Conclusion: The results underline the dangers of such marketing strategies in encouraging nicotine addiction and dependence. Consequently, the UK government and Advertising Standards Authority should do more to clamp down on these social media posts and introduce tighter regulations to protect young people and uphold their freedom from exploitation.

In recent years, libraries have become increasingly aware of the need to present a more diverse representation of society in their collections. While some efforts have been made to improve gender, race and sexuality representation, little attention has been paid to the working classes. The purpose of this research is to encourage a debate about the social class make-up of institutional collections and how fair representation and lack of diversity can be addressed. The research entails three stages: (1) Interviews with the 36 members of Research Libraries UK to investigate current challenges that prevent them from recording provenance information for working-class books; (2) The inclusive and fair cataloguing of the Janet Powney Collection – a working-class prize book collection in Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives; and (3) The organisation of impact and engagement events to promote the Janet Powney Collection. The study highlights that, while librarians face many challenges in terms of time, money and resources, as well as differences in guidelines and practices, the correct recording of provenance is essential in recovering the voices of working-class individuals, giving them agency as autonomous writers, and developing new narratives of working-class life and culture that challenge myths perpetuated by those in higher positions of power.

In the early twentieth century, intense public debate was taking place in Sweden around the control of alcohol consumption. Under intense pressure from the growing temperance movement, the Swedish government passed a motion to hold a referendum on 27 August 1922 to determine whether a total prohibition of alcohol should be implemented. One of the most important means of influencing public opinions was the propaganda poster, which relied on simple pictures, catchy slogans and bright colours to domesticate the prohibition debate and make it easily digestible. This paper conducts a study of the posters produced by the 'yes' and 'no' campaigns during the lead-up to the referendum. It finds that, despite their opposing arguments, both sides used similar arguments based around the breakdown of family life and the breakdown of Swedish society, depicting an imagined present or future in which Sweden was lawless and traditional values were threatened. Furthermore, both sides stirred up class warfare, creating conflict between the Swedish people and the government, and depicting alcoholism as a predominantly male, working-class problem. Overall, it argues that the 'no' campaign posters were ultimately more successful because of their ability to play on voters' emotions rather than use rational arguments.

Purpose: This paper aims to historicise the contemporary chlorophyll trend through the first academic study of its early marketing in Sweden (1950-1953). Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates how brands used advertisements to convince female consumers of chlorophyll's necessity to fulfil certain aspirational goals.

Design/methodology/approach: In all, 150 advertisements for chlorophyll products were collected from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, as well as 600 additional advertisements for the three most popular products (toothpaste/mouthwash, sanitary towels and soap) from 1940 to 1950 and from 1954 to 1964. Then, multimodal critical discourse analysis was used to investigate how the products were marketed before, during and after the chlorophyll trend, identifying the general themes and linguistic/semiotic structures of the advertisements.

Findings: This paper shows how the commercial use of chlorophyll offered a lucrative opportunity for marketers, acting as a "tabula rasa" on which they could use discourses of science, nature, idealised femininity and luxury to draw connections with health, modernity and beauty, despite the product having no real purpose or value.

Originality/value: Viewing this fad from a historical perspective emphasises how brands, marketers and influencers continue to capitalise on the anxieties of female consumers with promises around beauty, hygiene and health. It, thus, offers us critical distance to reflect on contemporary claims about chlorophyll's health benefits to make informed choices.

This paper conducts a case study of the marketing of Virol—a malt extract preparation that was popular in early twentieth-century Britain—using advertisements from British newspapers. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it explores how marketers drew upon linguistic/semiotic resources to embed Virol in discourses of scientific knowledge and how these discourses were made to appear true. Through targeted marketing campaigns, Virol established consumer bases framed around three health concerns: malnutrition, constipation and anxiety. Using testimonies, buzzwords, photographs and infographics, Virol created an illusion of scientific rationality, yet the studies or authority figures behind their findings were never explicitly specified, leaving consumers to make assumptions about the product’s benefits using their own limited understandings. As women were the primary household shoppers, ‘scientific motherhood’ (and ‘wifehood’) was also drawn upon, producing a dichotomy that framed women as responsible for their families’ health, yet incapable of this responsibility without expert intervention.

Open up a book from the late 19th or early 20th century and chances are that you will find an inscription inside the front cover. Often, they are nothing more than handwritten names that state who owned the book, though some are a little more elaborate, with personalised designs used to denote hobbies and interests, tell jokes or even warn against theft of the book.

Many of our diets are, to some extent, determined by the whims of fashion. This is not an astute observation, nor a particularly new one – just consider the 1970s obsession with pineapple and quiche. But social media is undoubtedly ramping up the food fashion cycle.

One recent survey found that 49% of adults learn about food through Instagram: avocado toast, turmeric lattes and cloud eggs were all first brought to the public’s attention through “foodstagramming”. Repeated posts on social media influence the reputation of particular foods, promoting them and making them exclusive within social circles.

Ironically, however, many of these trendy “Instagrammable” foods have a long association with poverty.

This study draws on theories and methodologies from the fields of multimodality, ethnography and book history studiesto explore class conflict and social mobility in Edwardian Britain (1901-1914). Using a dataset of 2,998 book inscriptions, this work investigates the types of inscriptions present in books bought and exchanged in Edwardian Britain; the ways in which inscriptive practices varied according to location, gender, age, social class and occupation; the material and semiotic features of inscriptions; and their communicative and performative purposes. The findingsr eveal that inscriptive choices were primarily influenced by ‘class-based affordances’ that centred on the social status and wealth of book owners, as well as Edwardian social conventions and the specific, well-established norms of each inscription genre or sub-genre. For the working classes, inscriptions represented pride at owning a book for the first time, while the lower-middle classes primarily used inscriptions as symbolic gestures of social mobility to gain social capital and respect from peers .In contrast, the upper classes, who feared the collapse of hierarchical society, saw inscriptions as a way of advertising their wealth and high social status. However, there is some indication that the upper-middle classes were slightly more willing to embrace lower-class inscriptive practices. These findings suggest that we must reframe current conceptions of hegemony as the transmission of values from a dominant social group to a subordinate one, and view it, instead, as a continuous two-way process between different groups .Overall, the study demonstrates how blending multimodal analysis with ethnohistorical methodologies can uncover the important role of the inscription as a material microcosm of the social tensions that existed between class groupsin early twentieth-century Britain.

From its inception in 1869, margarine was considered a working-class food, associated with poverty and inferiority. In the early twentieth century, Swedish margarine brands set about to change public perception of the product, investing vast sums of money in extensive marketing campaigns to showcase it as suitable for the middle classes. However, wanting to retain as much market share as possible, they also continued to direct margarine advertisements at the working classes. Thus, a seemingly paradoxical situation emerged where the same brands, often in the same newspapers, published advertisements aimed at two distinct audiences. This paper uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a large body of margarine advertisements produced in Sweden between 1923 and 1933. Specifically, it considers how brands appealed to either working-class or middle-class identities, socialisation, relationships, and rituals in the arguments they put forward about the values of margarine. It finds that middle-classadvertisements were focused on promoting margarine as exclusive and luxurious, challenging prejudices and encouraging them to learn from the working classes, while working-class advertisements centred around respectability and keeping up appearances, valuing frugality and thrift and commending traditional ways of life and regional/national customs.

Purpose: This paper aims to use the advertisements of three major brands - Chymol, Formamint and Lifebuoy Soap - to examine how advertisers responded to the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Great Britain influenza pandemic. It looks particularly at the ways in which marketing strategies changed and how these strategies were enacted in the lexical and semiotic choices (e.g. language, image, colour, typography, texture, materiality, composition and layout) of advertisements.

Design/methodology/approach: A total of 120 advertisements for the three brands were collected from the British Newspaper Archive and analysed using the theory and analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis. The general themes and semiotic structures of the advertisements were identified, with the aim of deconstructing the meaning potentials of verbal and visual resources used to convey ideas about the pandemic, and how they work to shape public understanding of the products and make them appear as effective and credible.

Findings: Each brand rapidly changed their marketing strategy in response to the influenza pandemic, using such techniques as testimonials, hyperbole, scaremongering and pseudoscientific claims to persuade consumers that their products offered protection. Whilst these strategies may appear manipulative, they also had the function of fostering reassurance and sympathy amongst the general public in a moment of turmoil, indicating the important role of brands in building consumer trust and promoting a sense of authority in early twentieth-century Britain.

Originality/value: Exploring the way in which advertisers responded to the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic reminds us of the challenges of distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate medical advice in a fast-moving pandemic and highlights the need to cast a critical eye to the public health information, particularly when it comes from unofficial sources with vested interests.

This article uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the messages promoted by anti-suffrage postcards produced in Britain between 1909 and 1914. It identifies five salient themes across the postcards (subversion of gender roles; physical ridicule of women; mental ridicule of women; violence towards women; and an imagined future), arguing that, despite their aim of presenting anti-suffragists as united in their objective of opposing women’s suffrage, they contained clear paradoxical messages. It concludes that the postcard campaign ultimately failed because of the power of militancy, mass opposition to the brutal treatment of suffragettes, and the outbreak of the First World War.

This paper traces how the international music press used the clothing and appearance of the Irish blues/rock musician Rory Gallagher to mythologize him as the “People’s Guitarist.” I explore how this image was constructed and developed over time, as well as Gallagher’s own response to this mythologization and how it has consolidated since his death in 1995. I argue that Gallagher’s unwillingness to compromise his integrity and shift his music or clothing to fit changing trends made him an anomaly in an image-conscious music industry. Thus, his appearance became an easy target for the music press who focused overwhelmingly on his clothing in interviews and articles. This focus unfairly drew attention away from his music and downplayed the important contribution he made to the world of blues and rock. 

This paper explores the historical development of protein-enhanced foods in Great Britain and how they were marketed by food manufacturers to convince consumers that protein was essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It focuses particularly on Plasmon and Emprote - the two biggest brands of the early twentieth century - and uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to identify how semiotic resources are used to embed products in scientific rationality, promote health discourses and develop concepts of masculinity in accordance with the two strands of the physical culture movement. It argues that, just as today, food manufacturers capitalized upon the growing middle-class interest in functional foods and presented protein as an "elixir" that consumers should take to safeguard their health, the health of their families and the state of the nation. Overall, this study demonstrates that, even with today's strict legislation on food packaging and advertising, protein food manufacturers still use similar techniques to sell their products. In gaining a better understanding of the historical use of semiotic resources in food advertising, we can assess the legitimacy of current food regulations and ensure that people make informed choices when shopping.

Introduced in 1907, the 'real photo' postcard destabilized the boundaries between private and public life, enabling people to perform identity in ways that anticipate contemporary social media practices. In this visual essay, the author explores one particular phenomenon - the sharing of food - drawing comparisons with 'foodstagramming' in terms of its compositional structure, social objectives and communicative functions. In doing so, she challenges the supposed novelty of modes of self-presentation on social media, embedding them in a broader historical trajectory.