The Commodity Culture of Victorian England

The Commodity Culture of Victorian England PDF Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
This provocative and theoretically sophisticated book reveals how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Richards provides a valuable account of the interaction between cultural and business development in Victorian England by focusing on the evolution of advertising. Through an examination of five case studies, ranging from how advertisers employed images of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to their use of images of women just before WWI, he argues that the British developed a new type of culture in the mid and late-19th century--a new way of thinking and living increasingly based upon the possession of material goods, commodities. Revising the findings of some earlier scholars, Richards shows that 'cultural forms of consumerism . . . came into being well before the consumer economy did.' The 50 well-reproduced advertising images greatly enhance the value of this study." --M. Blackford, "Choice"

The Commodity Culture of Victorian England

The Commodity Culture of Victorian England PDF Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
This provocative and theoretically sophisticated book reveals how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Richards provides a valuable account of the interaction between cultural and business development in Victorian England by focusing on the evolution of advertising. Through an examination of five case studies, ranging from how advertisers employed images of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to their use of images of women just before WWI, he argues that the British developed a new type of culture in the mid and late-19th century--a new way of thinking and living increasingly based upon the possession of material goods, commodities. Revising the findings of some earlier scholars, Richards shows that 'cultural forms of consumerism . . . came into being well before the consumer economy did.' The 50 well-reproduced advertising images greatly enhance the value of this study." --M. Blackford, "Choice"

Novels Behind Glass

Novels Behind Glass PDF Author: Andrew H. Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521471336
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words PDF Author: Catherine Waters
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754655787
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
From 1850 to 1859, Charles Dickens 'conducted' Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain predominantly middle-class readers. He filled the journal with articles about various commodities, many of which raise questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services.Although studies of Victorian commodity culture have tended to focus on the novel, scholarly interest in Victorian periodicals and material culture has been prompted by recognition of the major role the press played in disseminating knowledge and information about the proliferating world of goods. At the same time, periodicals like Household Words were themselves commodities that relied on their marketability for survival. This book provides a cultural study of the journal's representation of commodities that records the changing relationship between people and things exposed in the contributors' attempts to come to terms with the development of urban commodity culture at mid-century.

Supernatural Entertainments

Supernatural Entertainments PDF Author: Simone Natale
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271077379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-century England

Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-century England PDF Author: Tammy C. Whitlock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the expansion of commodity culture and a mass consumer orientated market, and explores the wider social and cultural implications this had for society. The author emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution and, through a focus on retail crime and individual cases of middle-class shoplifting and fraud, provides the first detailed history of the "kleptomaniac" woman in 19th c. England.

Raw Material

Raw Material PDF Author: Erin O'Connor
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822326168
Category : Cholera
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analyzes the intertwined metaphoric language of capitalism and disease in nineteenth-century England.

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative PDF Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108706209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.

A Necessary Luxury

A Necessary Luxury PDF Author: Julie E. Fromer
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821418289
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
In A Necessary Luxury Julie E. Fromer analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer demonstrates how tea functions as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability.

The Imperial Archive

The Imperial Archive PDF Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860916055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
Argues that by meeting the vast administrative challenge of the British Empire - thorough maps and surveys, censuses and statistics - Victorian administrators developed a new symbiosis of knowledge and power. The book draws on works by Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker.

Gender and the Victorian Periodical

Gender and the Victorian Periodical PDF Author: Hilary Fraser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521830720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Table of contents