Fictions of Commodity Culture

Fictions of Commodity Culture PDF Author: Christoph Lindner
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Fictions of Commodity Culture is a wide-ranging study of consumerism and its literary representation from the Victorian period through to the postmodern era. Drawing on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, this lively book offers analysis of works by writers as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and Don DeLillo. From Gaskell's prefiguring of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting to Conrad's foreshadowing of the Sex Pistols story, Fictions of Commodity Culture shows the ways in which cultural production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often anticipated the crazy and disorienting consumer world of late capitalism.

Fictions of Commodity Culture

Fictions of Commodity Culture PDF Author: Christoph Lindner
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
Fictions of Commodity Culture is a wide-ranging study of consumerism and its literary representation from the Victorian period through to the postmodern era. Drawing on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, this lively book offers analysis of works by writers as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and Don DeLillo. From Gaskell's prefiguring of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting to Conrad's foreshadowing of the Sex Pistols story, Fictions of Commodity Culture shows the ways in which cultural production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often anticipated the crazy and disorienting consumer world of late capitalism.

Fictions of Commodity Culture

Fictions of Commodity Culture PDF Author: Christopher Lindner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315193885
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"This title was first published in 2003. What is retail therapy? Why is shopping fun? Where does desire end and ideology begin in a world of mass consumption? These are some of the central questions of "Fictions of Commodity Culture", a wide-ranging study of consumerism and its literary representation from the Victorian period through to the postmodern era. Cutting across period boundaries, this lively book draws on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory to offer analysis of works by writers as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad and Don DeLillo. From Gaskell's prefiguring of Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting" to Conrad's foreshadowing of the Sex Pistols story, the book shows the ways in which cultural production in the 19th and early 20th centuries often anticipated the crazy and disorientating consumer world of late capitalism."--Provided by publisher.

Fictions of Commodity Culture

Fictions of Commodity Culture PDF Author: Christopher Lindner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138720343
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2003. What is retail therapy? Why is shopping fun? Where does desire end and ideology begin in a world of mass consumption? These are some of the central questions of "Fictions of Commodity Culture", a wide-ranging study of consumerism and its literary representation from the Victorian period through to the postmodern era. Cutting across period boundaries, this lively book draws on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory to offer analysis of works by writers as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad and Don DeLillo. From Gaskell's prefiguring of Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting" to Conrad's foreshadowing of the Sex Pistols story, the book shows the ways in which cultural production in the 19th and early 20th centuries often anticipated the crazy and disorientating consumer world of late capitalism.

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words PDF Author: Catherine Waters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135195041X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. At the same time, Household Words was itself a commodity. With marketability clearly in view, Dickens required articles for his journal to be 'imaginative,' employing a style that critics ever since have too readily dismissed as mere mannerism. Locating the journal and its distinctive handling of non-fictional prose in relation to other contemporary periodicals and forms of print culture, this book demonstrates the role that Household Words in particular, and the Victorian press more generally, played in responding to the developing world of commodities and their consumption at midcentury.

Sentimental Materialism

Sentimental Materialism PDF Author: Lori Merish
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325161
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Examines the constructions of feminine consumption in the nineteenth century in relation to capitalism and domesticity.

Can't Get No Satisfaction

Can't Get No Satisfaction PDF Author: Christoph Perrin Lindner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


A Novel Marketplace

A Novel Marketplace PDF Author: Evan Brier
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place—Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.

Novels Behind Glass

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

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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.

The Cambridge Companion to the Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Novel PDF Author: Eric Bulson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107156211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This Companion focuses on the novel as a global genre and examines its role, impact and development.

Understanding Commodity Cultures

Understanding Commodity Cultures PDF Author: Scott Cook
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742534919
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
For the past century, the anthropological study of the Mexican economy has accentuated the cultural and historical distinctiveness of its subjects, a majority of whom share Amerindian or mestizo identity. By selectively reviewing this record and critically examining specific foundational and later empirical studies in several of Mexico''s key regions, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the new trans-border space in the U.S. and Canada for Mexican-origin migrant labor, this book encourages readers to critically rethink their views of economic otherness in Mexico (and, by extension, elsewhere in Latin America and the Third World), and presents a new framework for understanding the Mexican/Mesoamerican economy in world-historical terms. Among other things, this involves reconciling the continuing attraction of concepts like ''penny capitalism'' with the realities of a world ever more subjected to continental and global market projects of ''DOLLAR CAPITALISM.'' It also involves concentrating on the production and consumption of commodity value.The key concept ''commodity culture(s)'' serves as a thread to loosely integrate the separate chapters of this book. It is conceived as a way to operationally immobilize two contradictory tendencies: first, the tendency to understand an economy like Mexico''s as a separate reality from its sociocultural matrix thus distorting its influence; and, second, the tendency to submerge ''economy'' in its sociocultural matrix thereby diffusing its influence. This double immobilization promotes a focus on the interconnectedness of economy, society, and culture, but also makes it possible methodologically to approach themes like cultural survival, subsistence/livelihood security, use value, ecological degradation, human rights, or the sociocultural connectedness of the economy from the perspective of a commodity-focused analysis that privileges use- and exchange-value production and consumption. Such an approach provides a unique perspective in demonstrating how lived experience is informed by and shapes the diversifying funds of knowledge that enable Mexicans under economic stress to make culturally-informed choices in their material interest. The focus on deliberative decision-making, understood as involving utilitarian means-end reasoning necessarily influenced by social and moral considerations, promotes a balanced approach to the economy/culture relationship and to the role of agency in processes of economic transformation. The challenge to economic anthropology in seeking to understand processes of livelihood and accumulation in societies like Mexico with uneven development, persisting cultures of precapitalist origin, yet pervasive involvement in continental and global capitalist markets, is to deal with an unusually diverse array of capital/labor relations, as well as with significant sectors of the rural population with combined, if alternating, involvement in capitalist, petty commodity, and subsistence circuits of value production and consumption. The common denominator of this activity is deliberative choice by Mexicans regarding the acquisition, use, and/or accumulation of commodity value calculated in money terms. This market-responsive behavior, since the early 1980s, has been generated by conditions of subsistence and/or accumulation crisis in Mexico. There is an important message here that should be comforting to those in the United States who are threatened by or uneasy about the growing presence of Mexican migrants in our midst. It should also give pause to others who are quick to emphasize, even exoticize or romanticize, the cultural or ethnic differences between Mexicans and Americans. With regard to fundamental aspirations and considerations related to making and earning a living, including sociopolitical understandings, there is really very little difference between us. Too much has been made in the past of the concrete economic differences between our two countries represented in abstract, statistical terms (or in systemic terms regarding politics/political culture) as an asymmetrical First World-Third World divide. This notion of economic (and political) difference or ''otherness'' has been reinforced by a conflictive and controversial history that has shaped the international border between the U.S. and Mexico, and reverberated in our respective national identities, since the middle of the 19th century. It has also been accentuated by the impersonal, instrumental discourse of international capitalist development which has made ''maquiladora,'' ''indocumentado,'' and ''cheap labor'' household words in both countries. Against this litany of economic (and political) difference, the lesson to be gleaned from the record of study of Mexican/Mesoamerican commodity culture, from the highlands of Guatemala to the Valleys of Oaxaca or Guerrero to the coasts of Veracruz and along the Rio Bravo side of the border, is that its bearers and fashioners, the peoples of this vast region south of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, think and act about making and earning their livelihood just as we would in their space. It is this fundamental recognition of our common humanity that should be uppermost in all of our minds as we negotiate and struggle our respective ways together through NAFTAmerica in the twenty-first century.