Introduction

Abstract

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.