Authenticity Gets a Makeover

Elizabeth Outka's Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic explores the contradictory union of the ideal of aesthetic purity with commercialism in early twentieth-century mass culture and literary works. With examples ranging from ads for cocoa to Howards End, Outka develops the concept of the "commodified authentic": the paradox that while the commercialization of authenticity makes it accessible to the masses, its resistance to commodification is precisely what constitutes the authentic's appeal. Outka's analysis is notable for its attention to the industrial incarnation of packaged authenticity, and for her insistence upon the continued pertinence of the concept of authenticity to modernist literature.