Abundant Fable (History of American Advertising Culture)

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Features: The Riches of a 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. Engaging, fluid, and moving!!! — Alezander 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 issues it raises when placed under the theme of modernity, presenting a masterful work on the history of American culture. — Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University
The Riches of a 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 outstanding work of cultural history. The content primarily places the rise of 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; a cool, unified individualism increasingly dominated; factory production systems and the rationality of administrative agencies in modern enterprises triumphed; yet at the same time, irrational and animistic non-mainstream trends persisted in mainstream and avant-garde art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, the story this book tells is how, in contemporary America, advertising works closely with other mechanisms to the mainstream ideology, public anxieties of the current society, and even recommends certain viewpoints to guide individuals in self-identity. This is a cultural history of American advertising, fluid, engaging, and moving. The creative ideas are unexpected, offering eye-opening concepts that narrate the advertising civilization of 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.