Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic

ISBN-13: 9780199921843 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 234 str.

Elizabeth Outka

Opis

In an unprecedented phenomenon that swept across Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, writers, advertisers, and architects began to create and sell images of an authentic cultural realm paradoxically considered outside the marketplace. Such images were located in nostalgic pictures of an idyllic, pre-industrial past, in supposedly original objects not derived from previous traditions, and in the ideal of a purified aesthetic that might be separated from the mass market. Presenting a lively, unique study of what she terms the "commodified authentic," Elizabeth Outka explores this crucial but overlooked development in the history of modernity with a piercing look at consumer culture and the marketing of authenticity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

The book brings together a wide range of cultural sources, from the model towns of Bournville, Port Sunlight, and Letchworth; to the architecture of Edwin Lutyens and Selfridges department store; to work by authors such as Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

Recenzje

Guilty pleasures become serious virtues in Outka's transformative account of 'commodified authenticity,' that prodigy by which modernist culture gave us such things as gorgeous fakeries, original copies, and mass-produced purity. Modern art, modern commerce: in this brilliant book, the two reveal all their most delicious collaborations and all the mass benefits of mass culture. Consuming Traditions brings us the best of both worlds. It is the best kind of book-one that wholly rethinks early twentieth-century culture and discovers much new to love about it.

O autorze

Elizabeth Outka is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond. She has published essays on modernism and British culture in Modernism/modernity, NOVEL and other publications.