Fables Of Abundance and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Fables of Abundance: Cultural History of Advertising in America
 
 
Share your own customer images
Search inside another edition of this book
Start reading Fables Of Abundance on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Fables of Abundance: Cultural History of Advertising in America [Paperback]

T. J. Jackson Lears (Author)

Available from these sellers.


Formats

 Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £12.10   -- --
Paperback £15.19   -- --
Paperback, May 1995 --   -- --
Books Trade-In
Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details.

Product details

More About the Author

Jackson Lears
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Jackson Lears Page

Product Description

Product Description

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..
Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence
FOR CENTURIES the hungry peasant bent to face the earth. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Tag this product

 (What's this?)
Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items.
Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:  4 reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
wordy but gratifying 15 Mar 1999
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
Format: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
Excellent, and counterintuitive 17 Nov 2000
By pnotley@hotmail.com - Published on Amazon.com
Format: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
Great condition 28 Aug 2010
By Jessica - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject




















i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback