PETIT TRIANON AND MARIE ANTOINETTE: REPRESENTATION, INTERPRETATION, PERCEPTION

My Dos between 2010-2014 was Professor Daniel Maudlin. I have belonged to the Faculty of Arts for this period, before transferring in the last year of completion to the Faculty of Business. I had to seek the expertise of the School of Tourism due to the interdisciplinary nature of my thesis.Images unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This interdisciplinary thesis belongs to Marie Antoinette studies. The contemporary dissonant commodification of the controversial historical character of the last Queen of France, detected at her former home, Petit Trianon, drives the course of the thesis research. Considering the complexity and controversy of the subject, the thesis seeks to make a contribution to extant scholarship by clarifying important modern history issues through a fresh approach: by using art history as an indicator in assessing the historical truth of the narrative of Petit Trianon, the residence identified as home to the last Queen of France. The thesis examines Petit Trianon and Marie Antoinette in the context of four major narratives - the historical, cinematic, architectural and heritage narratives - relevant to the contemporary heritage interpretation of Petit Trianon as well as its visitor perceptions. In addition to sourcing evidence for the arguments originating in art history information, the thesis relies on the data collection provided by a tailor-made survey for the topic, placing the results in the wider context of a hermeneutical interpretation of data found in either history or contemporary popular culture. The array of Marie Antoinette’s images detected by the analysis charts the commodification of this historical character at Petit Trianon: its production and consumption. It is through the assessment of this commodification that the present thesis reveals the misconceptions surrounding the historical character best known as Marie Antoinette. The thesis argues that the true role of the last Queen of France was successfully obscured through juxtaposition with her perception by the French collective memory. In other words, the perception of Marie Antoinette had subverted historical truth. Furthermore, the commodification of her historical character is perpetuated in an endless chain of representations fuelled by postmodern consumerism

CULTURAL HERITAGE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY : THE ROMANIAN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY : A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP

The aims of this dissertation are to analyse the relationship existent between cultural heritage and national identity in the specific case of an Eastern European nation-state, Romania, and to evaluate viability of the perpetuation of such relationship in the fiiture. The study does not consider this complex relationship as automatically axiomatic, but analyses it through Gregory Ashworth and Peter Howard's prism of a dual mode of understanding and analysis: firstly the construction of national identities through cukural heritage, and, secondly, the ways in which national identities choose to promote and preserve only certain aspects of the cultural heritage that created them To this theoretical core wall be applied two main theories: Ernest Gelbier's anthropological modernist nationalist theory and Jose Ortega y Gasset social philosophical theory of the masses. The research included studying various sources such as books, articles, journals, official projects and governmental plans, visiting various Romanian national museums and also interviewing key Romanian political and academic individuals involved in heritage matters. The dissertation considers various elements of cultural heritage taken in the context of different nationalist eras, indicating that national identities are the product of nationalism, and thus analysing the earlier noted symbiotic relationship within the capitalist, communist and the post-communist periods. Apart from investigating how the above-mentioned theories apply to all the studied eras, the analysis gives special attention to the concept of dissonant heritage, its extreme manipulation being a relevant indicator of the analysis. The result of the research is a confirmation of the symbiotic relationship between cultural heritage and national identity throughout the modem and post-modern eras until the present day, when the skuation starts to change; the emphasis is now on creating supra-national identkies. This is due to phenomena such as globalisation; uniformity brought by the empowerment of the masses, as opposed to the past domination of the elite; and also to legal bodies such as the European Union, which threaten the existence of the European nationstates, as k is known today. However, the reaction throughout Europe by contemporary nationalistic movements, which are agamst the planned supra-state configuration, leads to a situation in which the sunilarity and proximky determme the need for distinctiveness and delimkation, and vice versa; hence, the symbiotic relationship seems to be viable even within the present circumstance