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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $61.95

Format:
Hardback
224 pp.
236 mm x 160 mm

ISBN-13:
9780195372694

Publication date:
December 2008

Imprint: OUP US


Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, an the Commodified Authentic

Elizabeth Outka

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.

Readership : Scholars of modernism, early twentieth century drama and fiction, and consumer culture.

Preface
1. Selling Authenticity
Part One: Commodified Nostalgia and the Country Aesthetic
2. The Past is a Present Country: Model Towns and Commercial Utopias
3. Buying Time: E. M. Forster and the Neo-Nostalgic Home
Part Two: Urban Authenticities
4. The Vanishing Act of Commercialism: Selfridges, Modernity, and the Purified Marketplace
5. "Lustrous Behind Glass": Woolf, Window Shopping, and Authentic Display
Conclusion: Modernist Excursions

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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.

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Special Features

  • The first book to consider the cultural power of authenticity as a marketing tool, and the first to investigate that strategy's enduring importance for both modernism and modernity
  • Offers an innovative blend of cultural analysis, extensive archival work, and literary close reading
  • Redefines the debate surrounding literary modernism and the market, offering a radical new reading of the relationship; rather than simply considering how modernists appropriated the market, the book shifts the discussion to explore the market's appropriation of certain modernist values