The study of advertising and its treatment of utopian appeal enhance our understanding of consumer culture. By looking into the advertising page, we also look into consumers' desires and the process by which these desires are reshaped and rechanneled through images and narratives created solely for the purpose of making a sale. Utopian Images and Narratives in Advertising: Dreams for Sale, edited by Luigi Manca, Alessandra Manca, and Gail W. Pieper, is a collection of essays which gather a host of academicians from a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology, literature, fine arts, history, religious studies, communication, and media studies. Through their expansive disciplinary expertise, the contributors bring unique insights to the analysis of the advertising page. The collection's cross-disciplinary investigation also examines gender images and narratives which, in the advertising page, are frequently associated with utopian fantasies. The analyses offered in Utopian Images and Narratives in Advertising will appeal to any scholar or student engaged in mass media, communication, and the effect of advertising and consumerism on individuals and cultures.
1. Introduction: Probing Madison Avenue's Utopian Images and Narrative, Luigi Manca, Alessandra Manca, and Gail W. Pieper 2. The Portrayal of Utopian Spaces in Magazine Advertisements, Luigi Manca and Alessandra Manca 3. Water, the All-Purpose Utopia, John Kloos 4. Women and Children in a Fragile Paradise, Jean-Marie Kauth 5. Welcome (Back) to the Brotherhood: Nostalgia, Masculinity, and the Selling of the Mitchum Man, Zubair S. Amir 6. Absolute Utopia: Advertising the American Dream "In an Absolut World", Kathryn Kiick 7. Utopia on the Common Ground: Norman Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties, William Scarlato 8. Utopian Images and Gender in Web-Based Advertisements: A View from the Starting Line, Chris Birks 9. Jungian Archetypes in Advertising Imagery, Margaret Salyer 10. Selling the Good Old Days: Images of Community Life in Contemporary American Advertising, Jonathan F. Lewis and Paul A. Catterson 11. Masculine and Feminine Images in Italian Magazine Advertising, Maria Lucia Piga, translated by Dolores Sorci-Bradley 12. Black Face-White Utopia: Images of African-Americans in Advertising, Vincent Gaddis 13. Utopian Scenarios in Hispanic Advertisements: People en Espanol, Joaquin Montero 14. Advertising, Neoliberalism, and the Financial Collapse of 2008, Robert L. Craig 15. Living in Worlds We'd Like to Live In: Capitalist Utopias in an Age of Counterfactuality, Ed McLuskie 16. The Four Women of the Apocalypse: Utopia or Dystopia?, Marian M. MacCurdy
