Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s

Simone Weil Davis

Published by Duke University Press 2000

Living Up to the Ads

Gender Fictions of the 1920s

Simone Weil Davis

In the series New Americanists

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822377641

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Simone Weil Davis is Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University.

Reviews

“A strikingly thoughtful study of a crucible period in American cultural and literary history. Bristling with intelligence, highly engaged, and critically informed, Living Up to the Ads investigates the shifting nature of selfhood as commodity capitalism and public relations converge on the subject.”—Jennifer Wicke, author of Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading

“A very stimulating book. Davis explores the complexity of the relations between advertising and personal identity, and between advertising and literature, with a lively, sharp, idiosyncratic style.”—Rachel Bowlby, author of Shopping with Freud

“Davis offers a new and provocative perspective on a cultural shift that, even in the 1920s, was marked as much by its subtle presence in fiction as it was by its heavy-handed presence in print media. This book will contribute a great deal to interdisciplinary studies of commodity culture.”—Jennifer Scanlon, author of Inarticulate Longings: “The Ladies’ Home Journal,” Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter I Doubled Truth Uplift and the Bottom Line Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	22
Chapter 2 The Pep Paradigm Masculinity, Influence, and Shame in Babbitt and The Man Nobody Knows Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
Chapter 3 "Complex Little Femmes" Adwomen and the Female Consumer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
Chapter 4 "Lending an Air of Importance" Vehicles at Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
Chapter 5 In the Tutu or out the Window Zelda Fitzgerald and the Possibility of Escape Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 264
Illustrations
- Other: 14 b&w photographs

eBook

Published: March 16, 2000
ISBN: 9780822377641