Anat Rosenberg

University of London, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Faculty Member

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I am Professor of Law and the Humanities at IALS, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I study the history of modern capitalism, liberalism, and media, drawing on multidisciplinary methods in Law and the Humanities, including law and visuality, law and materiality, and law and literature.
Phone: +44 20 7862 5821
Address: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
Charles Clore House | 17 Russell Square

London | WC1B 5DR

United Kingdom

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Andrej Dujella

University of Zagreb

Hemin Koyi

Uppsala University

Jana Javornik

University of East London

Graham Martin

University of Leicester

Gwen Robbins Schug

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Gabriel Gutierrez-Alonso

University of Salamanca

John Sutton

Macquarie University

Eros Carvalho

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Kevin Arbuckle

Swansea University

Jesper Hoffmeyer

University of Copenhagen

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Contract and Freedom(

The Rise of Mass Advertising

Oxford University Press eBooks, Sep 22, 2022

This book is a first cultural legal history of advertising in Britain, tracing the rise of mass a... more This book is a first cultural legal history of advertising in Britain, tracing the rise of mass advertising circa 1840–1914 and its legal shaping. The emergence of this new system disrupted the perceived foundations of modernity. The idea that culture was organized by identifiable fields of knowledge, experience, and authority came under strain as advertisers claimed to share values with the era’s most prominent fields, including news, art, science, and religiously inflected morality. While cultural boundaries grew blurry, the assumption that the world was becoming progressively disenchanted, itself closely related to concepts of boundaries, was undermined as enchanted experiences multiplied with the transformation of everyday environments by advertising. Non-rational ontologies and a play of mystery became apparent, involving possibilities for metamorphoses, magical efficacy, animated environments, affective connections between humans and things, imaginary worlds and fantasies that informed mundane lifed. These disrupted assumptions that the capitalist economy was a victory of reason. The Rise of Mass Advertising examines how contemporaries came to terms with the disruptive impact by mobilizing legal processes, powers, and concepts. Law was implicated in performing boundary work that preserved the modern sense of field distinctions. Advertising’s cultural meanings and its organization were shaped dialectically vis-à-vis other fields in a process that mainstreamed and legitimized it with legal means, but also construed it as an inferior simulation of the values of a progressive modernity, exhibiting epistemological shortfalls and aesthetic compromises that marked it apart from adjacent fields. The dual treatment meanwhile disavowed the central role of enchantment, in what amounted to a normative enterprise of disenchantment. One of the ironies of this enterprise was that it ultimately drove professional advertisers to embrace enchantment as their peculiar expertise.

Introduction

Introduction to The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022, open access 2023)

The Introduction opens by reviewing the expansion of advertising in Britain circa 1840–1914. It t... more The Introduction opens by reviewing the expansion of advertising in Britain circa 1840–1914. It then turns to the book’s central arguments. Beginning with modernity-as-disenchantment, it reviews the extensive body of scholarship that has theorized enchantment by advertising, and places the book’s approach and findings in relation to this scholarship. The discussion then turns to questions of cultural boundaries, which unfolded within the tensions of dis/enchantment. It reviews the impact of legally empowered boundary work on advertising, which was simultaneously legitimized and ridiculed, stabilized and disparaged. It also discusses the dialectical impact of boundary work on the fields that interacted with advertising, among them news, art, and science. Next it explains the argument about the disavowal of enchantment as a normative enterprise and its implications. Lastly, the Introduction explains the book’s legal theory, methodology, sources, and choices of place and time.
Full book open access: https://academic.oup.com/book/44294?login=false

Anat Rosenberg

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