One of the aims of this study is to establish foundations for a ready and clearly defined appreciation of authenticity as an 'effect of presentation' and the instrumentalization of authenticity as a utopian category in cultural criticism from the beginnings of modernism age to today. In line with the identification of the logic and dynamics of the authenticity effect as a reflection of ultimate individuality and with explicit reference to pre- and post-Romantic sentimentalism, the study takes a comprehensive view of the wide-ranging genealogy of the need for authenticity, covering the feminist concept of 'subjective authenticity', early Enlightenment criticism of courtly traditions, Romantic criticism of philistinism, the concept of eloquentia cordis in the age of Empfindsamkeit, Winckelmann's celebration of 'noble simplicity', Herder's philosophy of the 'haptic', Mereau's, Grimm's, Moritz' and Goethe's visions of the childlike and youthful, Foucault's 'Parrhesia', and finally Sulzer's and Schiller's temporalizations of authenticity in the framework of their philosophies of history.