Advertising in early twentieth-century literature: crossing boundaries between literary categorizations

This thesis investigates the role of advertising in literature from the mid-Nineteenth century until the 1930s. The aim is to identify the different approaches to advertising in the works of several and very different authors, to help reassess canonical literary categorizations. I start by analysing the negative representation of advertising in the works of Victorian and early Twentieth-century authors. I move on to examine the enthusiastic approach in the literature of the avant-garde and modernist authors, and conclude with a study of the ambivalent take from writers of the 1930s. My analysis of the different approaches towards advertising has revealed that traditional literary classifications are not absolute if one considers the treatment of popular culture, and that very different writers present strong similarities of thought on the subject. The findings also identify a gradual change in the perception of the relationship between advertising and literature in the time frame analysed, whereby from being deemed strictly separate and antagonistic, they were progressively identified as equals and interchangeable, and finally as separate but in a complementary relationship with each other.