"Each year in the United States, millions of mass-produced greeting cards proclaim their occasional messages: ""For My Loving Daughter,"" ""On the Occasion of Your Marriage,"" and ""It's a Boy!"" For more than 150 years, greeting cards have tapped into and organized a shared language of love, affection, and kinship, becoming an integral part of American life and culture. Contemporary incarnations of these emotional transactions performed through small bits of decorated paper are often dismissed as vacuous clichés employing worn-out stereotypes. Nevertheless, the relationship of greeting cards to systems of material production is well worth studying and understanding, for the modern greeting card is the product of an industry whose values and aims seem to contradict the sentiments that most cards express. In fact, greeting cards articulate shifting forms of love and affiliation experienced by people whose lives have been shaped by the major economic changes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Token of My Affection shows in fascinating detail how the evolution of the greeting card reveals the fundamental power of economic organization to enable and constrain experiences of longing, status, desire, social connectedness, and love and to structure and partially determine the most private, internal, and intimate of feelings.
Beautifully illustrated, A Token of My Affection follows the development of the modern greeting card industry from the 1840s, as a way of recovering that most elusive of things-the emotional subjectivity of another age. Barry Shank charts the evolution of the greeting card from an afterthought to a traditional printing and stationery business in the mid-nineteenth century to a multibillion-dollar industry a hundred years later. He explains what an industry devoted to emotional sincerity means for the lives of all Americans. Blending archival research in business history with a study of surviving artifacts and a literary analysis of a broad range of relevant texts and primary sources, Shank demonstrates the power of business to affect love and the ability of love to find its way in the marketplace of consumer society."
By:
Barry Shank
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 210mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 581g
ISBN: 9780231118781
ISBN 10: 0231118783
Series: Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 01 September 2004
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Structured Feelings amid Circulations of the Heart 1. Vicious Sentiments: Nineteenth-Century Valentines and the Sentimental Production of Class Boundaries 2. The Nineteenth-Century Christmas Card: The Chromo-Reproduction of Sentimental Value 3. Corporate Sentiment: The Rise of the Twentieth-Century Greeting Card Industry and the American Culture of Business 4. Condensation, Displacement, and Masquerade: The Dream-Work of Greeting Cards 5. Knitting the Social Lace: The Use of Greeting Cards 6. All This Senseless Rationality: Beyond the End of the Modern Era of Greeting Cards Notes Bibliography Index
Barry Shank is associate professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. His work on popular culture has appeared in such journals as boundary 2, Radical History Review, American Studies, and American Quarterly. He lives in Bexley, Ohio.
Reviews for A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture
This volume will be a useful addition to marketing and social sciences collections... Recommended Choice An intellectually rich, deeply researched history of mass-produced consumer good whose success depends on its ability to connect people emotionally. -- David Farber Enterprise & Society A carefully detailed history... An interesting read. Antiques & The Arts Weekly This well-written and nicely illustrated book illuminates how the imagery in greeting cards has reflected overt and covert classist assumptions. -- Cele C. Otnes Journal of American History A carefully detailed history. Antiques and the Arts Weekly A Token of My Affection is an important work of American studies and contributes much to business history. -- Catherine Gudis American Studies A beautifully illustrated, painstakingly researched book... [a] smart, ambitious, innovative study. -- Lori Merish American Historial Review
