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Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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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"
Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book
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"
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.
Author: Catherine Waters
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754655787
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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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.
Author: Tammy C. Whitlock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351947567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
Whilst the actual origins of English consumer culture are a source of much debate, it is clear that the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in retailing and consumption. Mass production of goods, improved transport facilities and more sophisticated sales techniques brought consumerism to the masses on a scale previously unimaginable. Yet with this new consumerism came new problems and challenges. Focusing on retailing in nineteenth-century Britain, 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. Using trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports, literature, and popular ballads, it analyses the rise, criticism, and entrenchment of consumerism by looking at retail changes around the period 1800-1880 and society's responses to them. By viewing this in the context of what had gone before Professor Whitlock emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution, and argues that the dazzling new world of consumption had beginnings that predate the later English, French and American department store cultures. It also challenges the view that women were helpless consumers manipulated by merchants' use of colour, light and display into excessive purchases, or even driven by their desires into acts of theft. With its interdisciplinary approach drawing on social and economic history, gender studies, cultural studies and the history of crime, this study asks fascinating questions regarding the nature of consumer culture and how society reacts to the challenges this creates.
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.
Author: Francoise Barret-Ducrocq
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140173269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Using firsthand documents uncovered in the archives of a London foundling hospital, Barret-Ducrocq offers a marvelously acute census of Victorian sexual and moral attitudes.
Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848445X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
Author: Erin O'Connor
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822326168
Category : Cholera
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Analyzes the intertwined metaphoric language of capitalism and disease in nineteenth-century England.
Author: Jonathon Shears
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781409439905
Category : Art objects in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This collection of essays is concerned with the phenomenon of bric-a-brac in Victorian literature. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the traditions of commodity culture.
Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860916055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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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.
