| Review | Journal of Social History, 41.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 41.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780–1830. By Karin Wurst (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. ix plus 485 pp. $59.95).

Karin Wurst takes fashion seriously. The dissemination of modern mentalities evident in new discourses on entertainment during the German Sattlezeit forms the central focus of her recent book. She seeks to explore the "multiple layers of discourse, meanings, practices, and codes that fabricate the discourses of pleasure" and relates them to the formation of upper-middle class identity (xxv). Based on her readings of such classic writers as Goethe and Schiller, as well as fashion magazines, travel accounts, novels, and plays, Wurst argues that a new emphasis on entertainment and an expansion of cultural activities emerged in the decades between 1780 and 1830. She expands her study on cultural life to material, domestic, and visual culture—fashion and the magazines and illustrations that supported it, dinner parties, landscape gardens, resorts, and theatrical performances—to argue that middle-class lifestyle extended beyond the Habermasian model that underscored the central role of literature and critical discourse. She concludes that varied forms of cultural entertainment, understood as the desire for novelty and stimulation, and the consumption associated with them fostered a "consensus-based modern hegemonic social order" (350–351).

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