In this book author offers a scholarly, multidisciplinary discussion of the relationship between advertising and culture, straying into literature, art, religion, and other areas to show how advertising has affected culture rather than merely reflecting it.

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.

This book traces their rise against a richly varied backdrop. Its range encompasses literature, religion, and the visual arts, as well as economics, public policy, and the history of medicine. Its cast of characters includes a host of remarkable figures in or around advertising, from P. T. Barnum and Theodore Dreiser to John B. Watson and Joseph Cornell.
The book explores the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce what have become the dominant aspirations, anxieties, and even notions of personal identity in the twentieth-century United States.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The Reconfiguration of Wealth
1 The Lyric of Plenty
2 The Modernization of Magic
3 The Stabilization of Sorcery
4 The Disembodiment of Abundance
Part II: The Containment of Carnival
5 The Merger of Intimacy and Publicity
6 The Perfectionist Project
7 The New Basis of Civilization
8 Trauma, Denial, Recovery
Part III: Art, Truth and Humbug
9 The Problem of Commercial Art in a Protestant Culture
10 The Courtship of Avant-Garde and Kitsch
11 The Pursuit of the Real
12 The Things Themselves
Notes
Index

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