A01=Rachel Bowlby
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Author_Rachel Bowlby
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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Category=JBSF11
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Consumer choice
COP=United Kingdom
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Edith Wharton
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Great Expectations
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Virginia Woolf
Product details
- ISBN 9781399528405
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2024
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women's defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood, this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing manuals and newspaper stories, as well as novels and tragedies, from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading of all kinds of text as a historical method, showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions, and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman, the mother, the consumer, the parent all human characters clash and change, and so do their likely stories.
Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at University College London. Most recently, she is the author of Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024) and Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025).
