Abundant Allegory: A History of American Advertising Culture

Author: (USA) Leszlo Lleszlo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: The Riches of Fable explores how advertising, as a cultural pattern, incites impulses, dominates the desire for the world, regulates social behavior, and how dissidents rise up in rebellion against this cultural authoritarianism. Enchanting, fluid, and moving!!! — Alezander Star The New Republic Leszlo is a master of cultural history, able to weave together art, philosophy, industry, commodities, and popular trends into a melodious narrative. — The New York Review of Books Leszlo brilliantly organizes the origins of advertising and the complex issues it raises when placed under the theme of modernity. A masterful work on the history of American culture. — Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University The Riches of Fable is divided into three parts chronologically, aiming to interpret the cultural role and influence of advertising by reviewing the two-century development of advertising in America. The book is written in a fluid style with detailed evidence, making it an excellent work of cultural history. The content of the book primarily places the interest in national advertising of the United States within a broader, transatlantic cultural historical context: Western science led to the decline of animistic worldviews; market exchange transcended traditional spatial and temporal boundaries; the individualism that values rationality and unified personality increasingly dominates; the factory production system and the rationality of administrative agencies in modern enterprises have achieved great success; but at the same time, irrational and animistic non-mainstream trends have always existed in the mainstream and avant-garde arts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Therefore, the story this book tells is that in contemporary America, advertising works closely with other mechanisms to vigorously shape the mainstream ideology of society, public anxieties, and even recommend certain viewpoints to guide individuals in self-identity. This is a cultural history of American advertising, fluid, enchanting, and moving. Unprecedented creativity, eye-opening concepts, it narrates the history of advertising civilization of a nation in a melodic way, allowing readers to immerse themselves in it. The book won the Los Angeles Times Best Book Award in the category of history for that year.