This article examines the impact of commercial practices on popular American and British literature by analyzing the usage made since World War II of brand names and generic names in the scripts of a selected set of hit plays performed on the New York stage and the London stage. Taken together with the results of an earlier study on popular American novels, the findings lend support to the charges of increasing commercial influence in the popular literature of the postwar era. The findings also underscore the significance of earlier conceptualizations such as “word-of-author advertising” as well as commercial and non-commercial forms of materialism.
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