Calin D. Lupitu

• Apart from the author's personal interest in phenomena dealing with the construction, negotiation, maintenance, manipulation and reification of personal and public identity, this work is based on consistent recent confirmations of masks not only being 'alive and well' in popular culture as well as in (social) media, but in fact articulating socio-political power in ways not unlike those of their archaic prototypes. Therefore, one aim pursued herein is the tracing of an evolution of masks in the Western collective consciousness, across several outstanding epochs and genres, which we have linked together in order to better visualise performance, reception and interaction trends leading up to the present. Another aim of this research is the introduction of new patterns and categories as conceptual tools for further investigation, beginning with defining the Mask Metempsychosis process itself and discussing its three phases in specific contexts of cultural history, as indicated above. Thirdly, mask-wearing archetypes of folklore and more recent fiction will be analysed throughout, together with outstanding characters they have engendered, based on the previously set two layers of reception. The reader shall thus gain further insight into masks' articulation of power and aesthetics as part of the complex everyday and ceremonial negotiations of private and public, self and community, as well as of the socio-political with the religious and the psychological.