1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910786604103321

Autore

Davis Simone Weil <1957->

Titolo

New Americanists : Living Up to the Ads : Gender Fictions of the 1920s [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Durham, NC, USA, : Duke University Press, 20000301

Duke University Press

ISBN

0-8223-7764-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (263 p.)

Collana

New Americanists Living up to the ads

Disciplina

659.1/042

Soggetti

SOCIAL SCIENCE

Gender Studies

Sex role in advertising - History - 20th century - United States

Sex role in literature

Commerce

Business & Economics

Advertising

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter I Doubled Truth -- Chapter 2 The Pep Paradigm -- Chapter 3 "Complex Little Femmes" -- Chapter 4 "Lending an Air of Importance" -- Chapter 5 In the Tutu or out the Window -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In Living Up to the Ads Simone Weil Davis examines commodity culture’s impact on popular notions of gender and identity during the 1920s. Arguing that the newly ascendant advertising industry introduced three new metaphors for personhood—the ad man, the female consumer, and the often female advertising model or spokesperson—Davis traces the emergence of the pervasive gendering of American consumerism.Materials from advertising firms—including memos, manuals, meeting minutes, and newsletters—are considered alongside the fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Bruce Barton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Davis engages such books as Babbitt, Quicksand, and Save Me the Waltz in original and imaginative ways, asking each to



participate in her discussion of commodity culture, gender, and identity. To illuminate the subjective, day-to-day experiences of 1920s consumerism in the United States, Davis juxtaposes print ads and industry manuals with works of fiction. Capturing the maverick voices of some of the decade’s most influential advertisers and writers, Davis reveals the lines that were drawn between truths and lies, seduction and selling, white and black, and men and women.Davis’s methodology challenges disciplinary borders by employing historical, sociological, and literary practices to discuss the enduring links between commodity culture, gender, and identity construction. Living Up to the Ads will appeal to students and scholars of advertising, American studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and early-twentieth-century American history.