Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic

by Elizabeth Outka

In an unprecedented phenomenon that swept across Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, writers, advertisers, and architects began to create and sell images of an authentic cultural realm paradoxically considered outside the marketplace. Such images were located in nostalgic pictures of an idyllic, pre-industrial past, in supposedly original objects not derived from previous traditions, and in the ideal of a purified aesthetic that might be separated from the mass market. Presenting a lively, unique study of what she terms the "commodified authentic," Elizabeth Outka explores this crucial but overlooked development in the history of modernity with a piercing look at consumer culture and the marketing of authenticity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.
The book brings together a wide range of cultural sources, from the model towns of Bournville, Port Sunlight, and Letchworth; to the architecture of Edwin Lutyens and Selfridges department store; to work by authors such as Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 2008

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive clarity and analytical force. Truly, there is not a word out of place in Outka's analysis, and her disciplined marshalling of evidence, historical observations, and close readings makes her insights seem inevitable while not diminishing their capacity to surprise and impress. Outka is very teacherly in her orderly, concise, and clear introduction of new ideas and artifact; she organizes her arguments in a simultaneously spare, rigorous, and entertaining way (no easy feat, though she makes it look easy here).

Outka argues that literary modernism maps the movement between longing for the past and aspiration for the future, nostalgia for the authentic item and desire for the proliferating commodity. Through readings of real estate, shopping spaces, and modernist texts, Outka demonstrates the productive (and sometimes distressing) entanglements of these contradictory impulses. She also suggests that modernist writers have been more subtle and complex in their accounts of "the commodified authentic" than (perhaps) have literary critics who want to assign bad faith to consumer screens. Outka argues convincingly that the ironic awareness of these contradictions is one of the distinguishing marks of modernist thought.