Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

While modernity aspired to "fix" radical alienation through aesthetics by assigning an ethical value to narratives, contemporary literature and the arts are no longer immune to the impact of commodity culture amplified by globalization. In the world of commodity, corporate logic, and cyborgs, the very notion of identity is frequently turned into a spectacle. Yet, it is also simultaneously mobilized by the search for what Jean Baudrillard describes as the "ecstatic" form that materializes aesthetics. Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature investigates not only how these transformations affect gender, racial, and class relations, but also how they impact the representation of historical events.

Dystopias in literature. --- Consumption (Economics) in literature.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What is a reference to an Italian Egyptologist doing in Louisa May Alcott's portrait of domesticity in Little Women? Why does Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's painter protagonist Avis Dobell know - and care - that her red shawl is dyed with desiccated beetles? Why might W. E. B. Du Bois's fictional sharecropper display a reproduction of a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau near his cotton field? These questions, and more, are answered by Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930. An interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, this book assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered, and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain, and wheat, it reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, the book considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures, and artists as self-aware acknowledgments of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own.

American fiction --- History and criticism. --- Commercial products in literature. --- Consumption (Economics) in literature. --- Imperialism in literature.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Chinese literature --- Consumer behavior --- Consumption (Economics) in literature --- History and criticism --- History

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This title examines the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of 'rugged consumers' in late 20th century American literature, who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. The book shows how certain authors position their rugged consumers within the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism, creating left- and right-libertarian maker communities that are skeptical of both traditional political institutions and (in its pre-neoliberal state) globalised corporate capitalism.

American literature --- Consumption (Economics) in literature. --- Material culture in literature. --- Consumption (Economics) --- Material culture --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Why was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? Why did Restoration and Augustan writers such as Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope describe, catalog, and memorialize the waste matter that their social and political worlds wanted to get rid of--from the theological dregs in Paradise Lost to the excrements in "The Lady's Dressing Room" and the corpses of A Journal of the Plague Year? In Making Waste, the first book about refuse and its place in Enlightenment literature and culture, Sophie Gee examines the meaning of waste at the moment when the early modern world was turning modern. Gee explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value. She finds that, in the eighteenth century, waste was as culturally valuable as it was practically worthless--and that waste paradoxically revealed the things that the culture cherished most. The surprising central insight of Making Waste is that the creation of value always generates waste. Waste is therefore a sign--though a perverse one--that value and meaning have been made. Even when it appears to symbolize civic, economic, and political failure, waste is in fact restorative, a sign of cultural invigoration and imaginative abundance. Challenging the conventional association of Enlightenment culture with political and social improvement, and scientific and commercial progress, Making Waste has important insights for cultural and intellectual history as well as literary studies.

Consumption (Economics) in literature. --- Refuse and refuse disposal in literature. --- Literature and society --- Waste (Economics) in literature. --- English literature --- History --- History and criticism. --- Great Britain --- Civilization