Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator [Hardcover]

Professor Erin Mackie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 20, 1997

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book deserves the widest possible audience. Its ultimate goal is no less than the full excavation of the modern, gendered, bourgeois subject. After reading this book, it is impossible to shop, drink coffee, or even read the newspaper without critical reflection on how these activities contribute to our deepest sense of self. Rooted in the eighteenth century, Market à la Mode can show us who we are and how we came to be." -- Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Modern Philology

"Upper-division undergraduates through faculty will find... this thoughtful well-researched work... useful." -- Choice

"This is an impressive work of synthesis and argument, an important contribution to the burgeoning field of cultural materialism in eighteenth-century studies." -- Ros Ballaster, Review of English Studies

Review

"This is one of the best books on an eighteenth-century topic -- one of the most ambitious, original, significant, timely, engaging, carefully argued, sophisticated, and lucidly complex -- that I have read in the last ten years." -- Laura Brown, Cornell University

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (August 20, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801855888
• ISBN-13: 978-0801855887
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,329,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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