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 clich's 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.
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