Book dossier

Advertising, subjectivity, and the nineteenth-century novel

by Sara Thornton

Using the concept of the 'language of the walls' - an expression first used in 1855 - Sara Thornton explores the influence of advertising on the production and consumption of fiction from 1830-1870. Growing systems of advertising (on hoardings, posters, in periodicals and novels) were changing reading and writing practices - and bringing in their wake a new understanding of how the subject read and how language operated. A modernist aesthetic was created by the random collaging of advertising which allowed new structures of thought to emerge. Novelists, journalists and copywriters in France and Britain were able to theorize their own engagement with the advert, and to comment upon its creative and destructive labour. They recognized that the subject hailed by the text and image of the rapidly evolving urban scape was in part constituted by that world of text, relying on it to be in the world. Moving between historical enquiry and theoretical analysis, Thornton traces the early recognition of what we now call a 'virtual' world. She explains a crucial moment in print culture and proposes new readings of key texts by Dickens and Balzac.