Scenes of Parisian Modernity

H. HAZEL HAHN is an Associate Professor of History at Seattle University, USA.

• Introduction PART I: 1815-1848 Consumption as Urban Pleasure: the Rise of Modern Consumer Culture Paris, the Capital of Amusement, Fashion and Modernity Fashion Discourses in Fashion Magazines and Delphine de Girardin's Lettres Parisiennes Charlatanism or Modern Merchandising?: the Mentalités of Publicity and the Commercialization of Culture Puff Marries Advertising: Mechanization and Absurd Consumerism in Jean-Jacques Grandville's Un Autre Monde PART II: 1848-1914 Introduction Boulevard Culture, Consumption and Spectacle Furnishing the Street: Urban Rationalization and Its Limits Consumer Technologies and Celebrity Culture The Modernity of Poster Art Le Courrier Français , Géraudel's Coughdrops and Advertising as Art Conclusion

"Integrating histories of Paris, consumption, the press, publicity, advertising, and spectacle, the book is consistently interdisciplinary, reading texts, images, and urban spaces. Hahn s book deepens our understanding of advertising business, advertising media, its regulation, its cultural representation, and its critique. She shows how various realities (celebrities, commodities, spaces, events, media, images, texts, etc.) can be commercialized, and works to raise commercialization to the status of a defining feature of modernity. For students of advertising history in particular, this is an important and stimulating book." - H-Urban"Hahn makes a compelling case for a significantly earlier onset of consumer and publicity modernism than conventionally understood. Moreover, the book demonstrates the importance, at least in France, of studying aesthetic modernism apart from economic conceptions of modernism, and the folly of subsuming aesthetic modernism under economic modernism . . .The incorporation of, and visual culture approach to, many illustrations and advertisements also places the work at the forefront of recent scholarship in cultural history." - Mary Lynn Stewart, Chair, Department of Women s Studies, Simon Fraser University