Jennifer Wicke - Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading

Wicke, Jennifer

This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive.

The book pages were scanned and converted to EPUB format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. The book may not offer the correct reading sequence, and there may be weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Some page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The process which identifies images might have found stray marks on the page which are not actually images from the book. The hidden page numbering which may be available to your ereader corresponds to the numbered pages in the print edition, but is not an exact match; page numbers will increment at the same rate as the corresponding print edition, but we may have started numbering before the print book's visible page numbers. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you.

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library and to promote universal access to all knowledge. The Archive's purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Created with abbyy2epub (v.1.7.6)

LITERATURE, ADVERTISEMENT, AND SOCIAL READING

io JUMBO THE Kl^PtJANT AND

Oscjjfr #Wilde have anything in common? Can highway billboards and the global wallpaper of Coke ads be read in conjunction with the mandarin prose of Henry James? In Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading Jennifer Wicke sets these ostensibly oppositional discourses in dialectic with one another, suggesting that advertising is a literature in its own right, and that literature is the litmus test by which advertisement itself can be read. Her book proposes a new critical stance toward advertisement and its political and aesthetic implications, arguing that it constitutes a powerful mode of social reading.

The rise of advertising, she contends, not only happened at the same time that the novel became popular; the growth of advertising was, in fact, crucial to the novels emergence as a powerful social institution. Wicke explores the confluence between advertising and the novel and, in her original analysis, shows how advertising was able to take on the status of a mass literature, enforcing its own codes of social reading, as well as how the novel relied on the conditions of advertising to permit it to become the major literary form of the nineteenth century.

The author places several works and authors

within the new social lexicon of advertising. Dickens, she writes, is not only one of the earliest practitioners of advertising writing, but his works uncannily adumbrate the future directions of advertising. James, who called the nineteenth century the age of advertising, positions advertising and publicity as necessary rivals of writing in an erotic social reading. And Joyces Ulysses deploys the tactics of modern advertising as the basis of its modernist writing techniques, taking its social reading into the avant-garde.

(Continued on back flap)

"sJO 1300

Wcke, Jennifer Advertising fictions

literature, adver

1927 00264 5767

Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading

The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms series Edward W. Said, Editor

'

LITERATURE, ADVERTISEMENT, & SOCIAL READING

JENNIFER WICKE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 1988

Columbia University Press New York Guildford, Surrey Copyright 1988 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wicke, Jennifer

Advertising fictions : literature, advertisement & social reading Jennifer Wicke.

p. cm.(The Social foundations of aesthetic forms series) Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-231 -06604-X

L English literatureHistory and criticism. 2. American literatureHistory and criticism. 3. Advertising in literature.

4. AdvertisingBooksHistory. 5. Dickens, Charles, 18121870

KnowledgeCommerce. 6. James, Henry, 1843-1916Knowledge_

Commerce. 7. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses. 8. AdvertisingGreat BritainHistory. 9. AdvertisingUnited StatesHistory.

I. Title. II. Series.

PR409.A38W53 1988

820'.9'355 dc 19 88-5015

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

Hardback editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper

REGiS COLLEGE LIBRARY

235 We1lr.Oey Street Weston, MA 02193

Contents

INTRODUCTION: ADVERTISING

AND CRITICISM. 1

One THE DICKENS ADVERTISER. 19

Two SPECTACULAR AUTHORSHIP:

AMERICAN ADVERTISING AUTHORS 54

Three THE AGE OF ADVERTISING:

HENRY JAMES AND THE ADVERTISING SCENE. 87

Four ADVERTISING AND THE SCENE OF

WRITING IN ULYSSES. 120

EPILOGUE: ADVERTISING TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE 170