Fables of abundance : a cultural history of advertising in America / Jackson Lears. Lears, T. J. Jackson, 1947- Advertising United States History 19th century. Advertising United States History 20th century. HF5813.U6 L418 1994 659.10973 20 LEF Includes index. Includes bibliographical references. The book explores the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce what have become the dominant aspirations, anxieties, and even notions of personal identity in the twentieth-century United States. Moving from the carnivals and market fairs of Renaissance Europe to the traveling peddlers of nineteenth-century America, Jackson Lears shows how early advertisers encouraged a new kind of magical thinking, detached from religious traditions and geared to an emerging market society. While patent medicine advertising's promise of magical self-transformation and exotic sensuality posed challenges to moral standards, advertisers themselves eventually sought to contain the subversive potential of this promise even as they continued to conjure it up. [New York] : Basic Books, c1994. c1994. 1994 Text xiv, 492 p. : eng United States United States