| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s. By Simone Weil Davis. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xii, 248 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8223-2411-3. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8223-2446-6.)

This perceptive book examines the relationship between the business of advertising and the formation of identity in the 1920s. It is a close textual analysis of three roles and how they became metaphors of selfhood: the adman, the consumer, and the "vehicle" who communicated the message of the advertisement. For Simone Weil Davis, those roles have pervaded twentieth-century understandings of selfhood and gender identity. 1

Living Up to the Ads is part discursive history and part literary study. Historically, it discerns powerful ideas structuring diverse texts from both commercial and literary arenas. The book's evidence includes popular and canonical novels, advertisements, and industry documents. The distinction between commerce and literature falls apart as Davis shows how 1920s fiction worked through advertising and advertising worked through fiction. Davis's juxtapositions make it "instantly recognizable" that the texts are "drawn from the same discursive pool." Davis's analysis, however, may be difficult to penetrate by readers who do not specialize in Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist cultural theory. . . .

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