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Fables of abundance : a cultural history of advertising in America

Author: T J Jackson Lears
Publisher: [New York] : Basic Books, ©1994.
Edition/Format:   Book : EnglishView all editions and formats
Summary:
American advertisements have become perhaps the most pervasive social icons in the modern world. This book traces their rise against a richly varied backdrop. Its range encompasses literature, religion, and the visual arts, as well as economics, public policy, and the history of medicine. Its cast of characters includes a host of remarkable figures in or around advertising, from P. T. Barnum and Theodore Dreiser to  Read more...
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Details

Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: T J Jackson Lears
ISBN: 0465090761 9780465090761
OCLC Number: 30547687
Description: xiv, 492 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Responsibility: Jackson Lears.
More information:

Abstract:

American advertisements have become perhaps the most pervasive social icons in the modern world. This book traces their rise against a richly varied backdrop. Its range encompasses literature, religion, and the visual arts, as well as economics, public policy, and the history of medicine. Its cast of characters includes a host of remarkable figures in or around advertising, from P. T. Barnum and Theodore Dreiser to John B. Watson and Joseph Cornell. The book explores the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce what have become the dominant aspirations, anxieties, and even notions of personal identity in the twentieth-century United States. Moving from the carnivals and market fairs of Renaissance Europe to the traveling peddlers of nineteenth-century America, Jackson Lears shows how early advertisers encouraged a new kind of magical thinking, detached from religious traditions and geared to an emerging market society. While patent medicine advertising's promise of magical self-transformation and exotic sensuality posed challenges to moral standards, advertisers themselves eventually sought to contain the subversive potential of this promise even as they continued to conjure it up.

Table of Contents:

by WTYILL@KUK (WorldCat user on 2006-07-03)

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART I
THE RECONFIGURATION OF WEALTH: FROM FECUND EARTH TO EFFICIENT FACTORY
1. The Lyric of Plenty 17
2. The Modernization of Magic 40
3. The Stabilization of Sorcery 75
4. The Disembodiment of Abudance 102
PART II
THE CONTAINMENT OF CARNIVAL ADVERTISING AND AMERICAN SOCIAL VALUES FROM THE PATENT MEDICINE ERA TO THE CONSOLIDATION OF CORPORATE POWER
5. The Merger of Intimacy and Publicity 137
6. The Perfectionist Project 162
7. The New Basis of Civilization 196
8. Trauma, Denial, Recovery 235
PART III
ART, TRUTH, AND HUMBUG:
THE SEARCH FOR FROM AND MEANING IN A COMMODITY CIVILIZATION
9. The Problem of Commercial Art in a Protestant Culture 261
10. The Courtship of Avant-Garde and Kitsch 299
11. The Pursuit of the Real 345
12. The Things Themselves 379
Notes 415
Index 477

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