Thornton Sara. Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls

Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. — xi, 214 pages. — (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture). — ISBN: 978-0-230-23674-5.From 1830 to 1870 advertising brought in its wake a new understanding of how the subject read and how language operated. Sara Thornton presents a crucial moment in print culture, the early recognition of what we now call a 'virtual' world, and proposes new readings of key texts by Dickens and Balzac.The Language of the Walls:
Spaces, Practices, Subjectivities
Thoroughfares for inscription
Moving text/motion pictures
Montage, mirage and the (mis)behaviour of language
Forms of subjection
The making of the subject
Reading the Dickens Advertiser:
Merging Paratext and Novel
The floating gaze: The monthly number as cadavre exquis 63 Gothic mechanisms of advertisement and novel:
Hysteria, paranoia and the testimonials
3 Balzac's Revolution of Signs:
Advertisement as Textual Practice
The language of the Paris walls
The becoming virtual of Cesar Birotteau:
Slogan, catch-phrase, recurrence, return
Dissolving literature: Lost illusions or great expectations?