"An ambitious and stimulating work that makes unanticipated connections among a wide variety of media, offering readers a fresh look at modernity and convincingly demonstrating that nineteenth-century Paris was indeed the capital of 'commercialmodernity.'" - "The American Historical Review""Integrating histories of Paris, consumption, the press, publicity, advertising, and spectacle, the book is consistently interdisciplinary, reading texts, images, and urban spaces. Hahn's book deepens our understanding of advertising business, advertising media, its regulation, its cultural representation, and its critique. She shows how various realities (celebrities, commodities, spaces, events, media, images, texts, etc.) can be commercialized, and works to raise commercialization to the status of a defining feature of modernity. For students of advertising history in particular, this is an important and stimulating book." - "H-Urban""Hahn makes a compelling case for a significantly earlier onset of consumer and publicity modernism than conventionally understood. Moreover, the book demonstrates the importance, at least in France, of studying aesthetic modernism apart from economic conceptions of modernism, and the folly of subsuming aesthetic modernism under economic modernism . . . The incorporation of, and visual culture approach to, many illustrations and advertisements also places the work at the forefront of recent scholarship in cultural history." - Mary Lynn Stewart, Chair, Department of Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University
