| This thesis situates the narratives of True Story magazine in the 1920s within and against the context of their surrounding advertisements in order to reveal a popular resistance to the logic of consumption that was aggressively marketed to working class readers at the turn of the century. I argue that while the confessional narratives of True Story magazine explore the possibilities of self reinvention and upward mobility in market society, they paradoxically reveal an anxiety about the veracity of the mass market’s promises for sociocultural advancement via consumption. Further, I explore the trope of the self-constructed consumer persona in modernist fiction in order to tease out a thematic “preoccupation with inauthenticity” that repeatedly begs attention not only in popular confessional magazines like True Story, but also in middle-market and canonical modernist novels such as Anita Loo’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee Jerusalem. |
