Abundant Allegory -- A History of American Advertising Culture

Author: (USA) Lears / Ren Hailong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: The Richness of Life explores how advertising, as a cultural pattern, induces impulses, dominates desires for the world, regulates social behavior, and how dissenters rise up in rebellion against this cultural authoritarianism. Enchanting, fluid, and moving!!! — Alexader Star, The New Republic Lears is a master of cultural history, able to weave together art, philosophy, industry, commodities, and popular trends into a captivating melody. — The New York Review of Books Lears brilliantly organizes the origins of advertising and the complex themes it raises when placed under the theme of modernity. A masterpiece of American cultural history. — Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University The Richness of Life 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 this book primarily places the interest in national advertising in 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 mainstream and avant-garde art 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 the current 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. Unexpected creativity, eye-opening concepts, it narrates the history of advertising civilization in a nation in a captivating way, allowing readers to immerse themselves in it. The book was awarded the Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in History.