Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator

by Erin Mackie

Overview

How eighteenth-century fashion publications assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities.

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801872532
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2003
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Erin Mackie is a professor of English at Syracuse University. She is author of Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," also published by Johns Hopkins, and editor of The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from "The Tatler" and "The Spectator."

What People are Saying About This

Laura Brown

This is one of the best books on an eighteenth-century topic -- one of the most ambitious, original, significant, timely, engaging, carefully argued, sophisticated, and lucidly complex -- that I have read in the last ten years.

— Laura Brown, Cornell University

From the Publisher

This is one of the best books on an eighteenth-century topic—one of the most ambitious, original, significant, timely, engaging, carefully argued, sophisticated, and lucidly complex—that I have read in the last ten years.
—Laura Brown, Cornell University

Editorial Reviews

This book deserves the widest possible audience. Its ultimate goal is no less than the full excavation of the modern, gendered, bourgeois subject. After reading this book, it is impossible to shop, drink coffee, or even read the newspaper without critical reflection on how these activities contribute to our deepest sense of self. Rooted in the eighteenth century, Market à la Mode can show us who we are and how we came to be.
—Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Modern Philology

Upper-division undergraduates through faculty will find . . . this thoughtful well-researched work . . . useful.
—Choice

This is an impressive work of synthesis and argument, an important contribution to the burgeoning field of cultural materialism in eighteenth-century studies.
—Ros Ballaster, Review of English Studies

From the Publisher

Upper-division undergraduates through faculty will find . . . this thoughtful well-researched work . . . useful.

Choice

This is an impressive work of synthesis and argument, an important contribution to the burgeoning field of cultural materialism in eighteenth-century studies.

Review of English Studies - Ros Ballaster

This book deserves the widest possible audience. Its ultimate goal is no less than the full excavation of the modern, gendered, bourgeois subject. After reading this book, it is impossible to shop, drink coffee, or even read the newspaper without critical reflection on how these activities contribute to our deepest sense of self. Rooted in the eighteenth century, Market à la Mode can show us who we are and how we came to be.

Modern Philology - Beth Kowaleski-Wallace