Can't get no satisfaction : commodity culture in fiction
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Date
29/05/2002Author
Lindner, Christoph Perrin
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Abstract
Drawing on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, this thesis
examines the representation of commodity culture in a selected body of nineteenth
and twentieth century fiction. In so doing, it explains how the commodity, as
capitalism's representational agent, created and sustained a culture of its own in the
nineteenth century, and how that culture, still with us today, has persisted and
evolved over the course of the twentieth century. It follows the commodity and the
cultural forms it generates through their historical development. And it considers
how fiction, from realism through modernism and into postmodernism,
accommodates and responds both to the commodity's increasingly loud cultural
presence and to its colonization of the social imagination and its desires.
The study begins by examining responses to the rise of commodity culture in
Victorian social novels before moving on to explore how key issues raised in
nineteenth century writing resurface and are reshaped in first early modernist and
then postmodernist fiction. The chapters focus, in turn, on Gaskell and the casualties
of industrialism, carnivals of consumption in Thackeray, Trollope's 'material girl,'
decay in Conrad, and shopping with DeLillo. Together, they argue that the task of
assessing commodity culture's impact on identity and agency represents a dominant
concern in literary production from the mid-nineteenth century onwards; and that
both the commodity and the consumer world through which it circulates find
ambivalent expression in the narratives that represent them. Finally, and as its title
suggests, the thesis finds that the commodity figures throughout the fiction of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a living object of consumer fetish that excites
desire yet strangely denies satisfaction.