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.
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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