[PDF] Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading

Wicke’s argument in this provocative and adventurous literary criticism book is that the growth of advertising was crucial to the emergence of the novel as a powerful social institution. Placing several works and authors – Charles Dickens, Henry James, and James Joyce, (as well as U.S. showman Phineas T. Barnum) – from three different national cultures, within the new social lexicon of advertising, she explores the confluence between advertising and the novel. Her original analysis, is that advertising was able to take on the status of mass literature enforcing its own codes of social reading and that the novel relied on the conditions of advertising to permit it to become the major literary form of the nineteenth century