Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920Ohio State University Press, 2006 - 279 páginas The shopgirl was the subject of popular novels, newspaper articles, and political treatises on women's work and leisure at the turn of the twentieth century. But who exactly was she, and why did she feature in so many narratives about women, sexuality, and urban life? In Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920, Lise Shapiro Sanders examines the cultural significance of the shopgirl-both historical figure and fictional heroine-from the end of Queen Victoria's reign through the First World War. As the author reveals, the shopgirl embodied the fantasies associated with a growing consumer culture: romantic adventure, upward mobility, and the acquisition of material goods. Reading novels such as George Gissing's The Odd Women and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage as well as short stories, musical comedies, and films, Sanders argues that the London shopgirl appeared in the midst of controversies over sexual morality and the pleasures and dangers of London itself. Sanders explores the shopgirl's centrality to modern conceptions of fantasy, desire, and everyday life for working women and argues for her as a key figure in cultural and social histories of the period. This innovative interdisciplinary study makes an important contribution to research on women, class, and consumer culture and will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Victorian and Edwardian life and literature. Lise Shapiro Sanders is assistant professor of English literature and cultural studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. |
Contenido
The Politics of Everyday Life | 19 |
Taking the Law in Ones Own Hands Punch 24 July 1880 | 40 |
Margaret Bondfield Grace Dare Shop Assistant c 1897 | 47 |
Labor Sex and Desire | 54 |
Physical Culture Class Harrodian Gazette August 1914 | 65 |
Selfridges Personality Tree London Magazine c 1910s | 79 |
Boredom and | 97 |
Absorption | 126 |
A Little White Slave ForgetMeNot March 1904 | 162 |
Gender Leisure and Consuming | 170 |
Still from Damaged Goods 1919 | 191 |
Ladies Sitting Room Harrodian Gazette July 1920 | 199 |
Notes | 201 |
Bibliography | 247 |
273 | |
Essie Armytage Dorothy Novelette April 1890 | 150 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 Lise Sanders Vista de fragmentos - 2006 |
Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 Lise Shapiro Sanders Sin vista previa disponible - 2016 |
Términos y frases comunes
analysis argued audience body Bondfield boredom Britain British California Press Cambridge University Press century chapter consumer fantasy consumption contemporary counter critics department store described desire display distracted domestic early film employment England essay everyday experience Fabian Society fantasy fashion female shop assistants feminine Feminism Gender girl Gissing Gissing's Harrods heroine History imagined industry Journal labor Ladies late Victorian leisure practice lives London London County Council magazines Margaret Bondfield marriage Maugham middle-class Mildred Mildred's modern Monica moral music hall musical comedy narrative nineteenth nineteenth-century novel novelette Odd Women Oxford penny period Philip Politics Popular Culture position produced prostitution readers reading reproduce retail romance fiction romance plot Routledge Selfridges serialized sexual shop assistants shopgirl Siegfried Kracauer social staff story suggests sumer texts Theatre tion trade transformation union University of Chicago urban Victorian and Edwardian vulgar West End William Whiteley woman workers working-class York young women