A Brand New Language: Commercial Influences in Literature and Culture

In the years since World War II, what began in the United States as a shift from a wartime to a peace-time economy soon led to a massive outpouring of a new commercial offering of consumer products and services accompanied by unprecedented efforts to market these commodities. How, Monroe Friedman asks, did these extraordinary commercial developments change the American people over the course of the post-war period?. He offers the beginnings of an answer to this, and many other related questions, by bringing together the individual components of a recently completed series of studies on changes in language used in the popular literature of the United States since 1945. The study asks how literature has been influenced by commercial developments. Brand names were used as the indicator of linguistic influence, and detailed content analyses were conducted to examine trends in the use of brand names in popular literature contexts. The first chapter provides background information for the individual studies and the last chapter attempts to make sense of their aggregate findings. Several intervening chapters examine the results of content analyses of popular novels, plays, and songs of the postwar era. Additional chapters look at the use of brand names in newspaper reporting of non-business stories, as well as the symbolic communication functions of brand names in both humorous and non-humorous writings. The penultimate chapter uses test data from consumer reports to analyze the quality of the consumer products whose brand names are frequently used in the popular literature of the post-war era.