Fables Of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising In America [Paperback]

Jackson Lears (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 1994

Fables of Abundance ranges from the traveling peddlers of early modern Europe to the twentieth-century American corporation, exploring the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce the dominant aspirations and anxieties in the modern United States.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this imposing, highly illuminating study, Rutgers history professor Lears (The Culture of Consumption) examines not just the rise of modern advertising but also the transformations of American culture that precipitated it and the influence of modern consumerism on our relationship to material objects. He deftly interweaves case histories of famous admen, like George H. Rowell, who founded the trade journal Printers Ink in 1888, and early modernist aesthete Earnest Elmo Calkins, with close readings of particular advertising campaigns and art and literature dealing with commodity culture. Lears's underlying thesis is that advertising, by treating objects of material abundance as signifiers of economic status and social progress, has reinforced America's puritanical alienation from the magic and carnivalesque hedonism of the pre-industrial world. He shows how a 19th-century commodity culture bustling with Barnumesque con men and patent medicine peddlars gave way to today's scientific-managerial consumer industries; and he chronicles the professionalization of an early 20th-century advertising industry headquartered on Manhattan's Madison Avenue. He also explores the intermingling of high and low art and suggests that the work of such artists as Proust and Joseph Cornell succeeds at investing material objects with an aesthetic value that transcends their role as mass produced, disposable goods.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Lears (history, Rutgers Univ.) offers a scholarly, multidisciplinary discussion of the relationship between advertising and culture, straying into literature, art, religion, and other areas to show how advertising has affected culture rather than merely reflecting it. He views as false and even harmful the ad industry's attempt to portray itself as rational rather than emotional and imaginative, arguing that the emphasis on managerialism and rational thought have permeated and impoverished our culture by removing the "magic." In addition, the founders of the major ad agencies are seen as belonging to a different socioeconomic class than the class of those they are trying to reach. Though one often needs an unabridged dictionary at hand to read this densely written work, it provides a cogent assessment of the ad industry's need to be more connected with our past and our culture. Recommended for relevant research collections.
Sue McKimm, Cuyohoga Cty. P.L., Parma, Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st ed edition (November 24, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465090753
• ISBN-13: 978-0465090754
• ASIN: 0465090761
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,627,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars wordy but gratifying, March 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Fables Of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising In America (Paperback)

Fables of Abundance is not an easy book to read. Lears sometimes takes relatively simple ideas and complicates them with wordy rhetoric. If you can get through it, however, Fables of Abundance offers a novel approach to looking at the history of advertising. It does not discuss particular ad campaigns or products like many books of its type. It instead focusses on advertising's reoccuring themes (i.e. the carnivalesque) and images (i.e. woman as symbol of abundance). The author also provides biographies of important figures in the history of advertising. Overall, if you have patience and a dictionary, Fables of Abundance is for you.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, and counterintuitive, November 17, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fables Of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising In America (Paperback)

Most people find advertising very irritating. This is not only understandable, but necessary and just. But what is it about advertising that should put one's teeth on edge? It is easy to believe that advertising encourages a world of greed and gaudy consumerism, a life of sterile self-indulgence. This was the view of the great American critic Thorstein Veblen. But one should avoid this temptation. In this book Jackson Lears provides a book that is not only revelatory about advertising but will help the reader about culture, nostalgia, memory, even life itself.

Lears, a historian who is not afraid to quote Marxists, agrees with Adorno that Veblen's attack on consumerism was an "attack against culture." Veblen represented a puritanical producerism that did not recognize the aesthetic and imaginative elements of consumption. Lears throughout this subtle and evocative book argues that advertising did not present the triumph of hedonism, but in fact the regulation of consumption to a strict regime of productivity, a trade-off between "routinized labor and zestful consumption." The book does not follow a simple narrative. But it does provide a fascinating account with many pregant apercus about the cold presence of an inhumane positivism, as well as the flaws of both the jargon of authenticity and the New York Intellectuals conflation of politics and style. Starting with the image of the breast and the cornocopia, and going on to the illusions of the Plain speech tradition, Lears looks not only at advertisements, but also cites much literature and theory to help him along. Melville, Dreiser, James and Proust are all invoked, Little Nemo and Krazy Kat are properly praised, coming to a benediction looking at the special achievement of Joseph Cornell and his boxes. Some readers of this review may find this summary pretentious, but those who go on to read Lears will find much that is truly revelatory.

0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great condition, August 28, 2010

By 

Jessica - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fables Of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising In America (Paperback)

this book was about 20 something dollars. i paid 4 and some change for this new book!!!!! it got in the mail around four days later with the standard mail, meaning, they shipped it as soon as one day from purchase. am super satisfied with the service. will definitely purchase future books from this store.