Commercial fiction: Advertising and fiction in American magazines, 1880s to 1910s

Turn-of-the-century magazines, through stories as much as advertising, helped construct the middle-class reader, particularly the woman reader, as consumer. Reading the magazine in its entirety as a text, rather than as an envelope for literature, this dissertation resituates the writing of Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and numerous noncanonical writers, in relation to commercial as well as literary culture. It surveys high and popular culture materials--including children\u27s scrapbooks of advertising cards, medical articles, advertising contests, outdoor advertising, and fiction that includes brand-name references--to investigate readers\u27 responses to the magazines, and the reading practices they brought to them. In late nineteenth-century urban households, buying rather than producing increasingly became the job of middle-class married women. While this economic situation made ads elaborating shopping choices attractive to women and made magazines that reached them attractive to advertisers, it also changed leisure magazine reading into work. Magazines such as Munsey\u27s, Ladies\u27 Home Journal, Ladies\u27 World, and even St. Nicholas became women\u27s trade press; reading was permeated with incentives to think in terms of goods to purchase for the household. Fictional formulas in the middle-class magazines, for example, flattered women readers as consumers by valorizing the importance of shopping and framing other choice-making acts as variants on shopping. But magazines addressed to working-class women discussed ways to earn money to replace household labor with commodities. Conventions of late nineteenth-century realist fiction naturalize a universe of domestic minutiae. The fictional world of possessions appears congruent with the world presented in ads: Fiction\u27s incorporation of advertising concerns and even advertised products makes products more familiar and advertising storylines more readily understood. As my examination of the marketing of the bicycle to women shows, fiction addressed anxieties about new products in ways ads could not. Reading magazines as texts embedded within the commercial world reveals that the magazine is not the site of a war between commerce and culture, in which literary or editorial interests are separate from and in conflict with the advertising and commercial side. Instead, the advertising-supported magazine\u27s work as an entity supports the interests of advertisers and the commercial discourse as a whole, constructing the reader as consumer