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Taylored Lives

Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford

Scientific management: technology spawned it, Frederick Winslow Taylor championed it, Thorstein Veblen dissected it, Henry Ford implemented it. By the turn of the century, practical visionaries prided themselves on having arrived at "the one best way" both to increase industrial productivity and to regulate human behavior. Martha Banta takes a close look at texts ranging from mail order catalogs and popular romances to the works of Henry Adams and Nathanael West to trace the effects of the efficiency craze on the full fabric of American culture.

446 pages | 40 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 1993

Culture Studies

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Barbaric Fictions
2. Soldiers of Fortune
3. Brutality and Betterment
4. Testimonies
5. Women Workers: New Era, New Force, Old Narratives
6. Heroines and the Law of Averages
7. House Lives
8. Society’s Wastrels
9. Ways Out
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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