Teaching Adaptations through Marketing: Adaptations and the Language of Advertising in the 1930s

Abstract

F. R. Leavis identified advertising as the lowest and most insidious form of writing and in its blatant underhanded methods and shameless materialism, he put it to use to expose the tackiness of writers who aimed to be ‘popular’, or middle-brow as opposed to high-brow. In Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), he attacks writers like Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett for stooping to the tactics of advertisers by unapologetically appealing to the lowest possible denominator in order to attract the widest audiences. Leavis’s unwitting legacy to adaptation studies can be traced to this volume and, with Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (1933): both books teach (or warn against) the menace of popularization. I would like to consider the concerns expressed within these two books, among them anxieties regarding the decay of language, the standardization of literary texts and the distrust for new technologies, within the context of the rise of the talkie adaptation (1927–) and the marketing of film adaptations in the 1930s.