Consuming Traditions

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.