A Token of My Affection : Greeting Cards and American Business Culture.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Structured Feelings amid Circulations of the Heart -- 1. Vicious Sentiments: Nineteenth-Century Valentines and the Sentimental Production of Class Boundaries -- 2. The Nineteenth-Century Christmas Card: The Chromo-Reproduction of Sentimental Value -- 3. Corporate Sentiment: The Rise of the Twentieth-Century Greeting Card Industry and the American Culture of Business -- 4. Condensation, Displacement, and Masquerade: The Dream-Work of Greeting Cards -- 5. Knitting the Social Lace: The Use of Greeting Cards -- 6. All This Senseless Rationality: Beyond the End of the Modern Era of Greeting Cards -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Color Plates.

For more than 150 years, greeting cards have tapped into and organized a shared language of love, affection, and kinship, becoming an integral part of American life and culture. Sumptuously illustrated, A Token of My Affection follows the evolution of the modern greeting card industry from a traditional printing and stationery business in the mid-nineteenth century to the multibillion-dollar industry it is today. Blending archival research in business history with a study of surviving artifacts and a literary analysis of a range of relevant texts and primary sources, Barry Shank demonstrates how greeting cards have affected and defined experiences of status, longing, desire, social connectedness, and love. Fascinating and surprising, A Token of My Affection shows what an industry devoted to emotional sincerity means for the lives of all Americans.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.