Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Rachel Bowlby (Professor of Comparative Literature, University College London)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399528412

ISBN 10:   1399528416
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   31 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Abbreviations Introduction: Unexpected Items Part I: Parenthood 1. Generations 2. A Tale of Two Parents: Dickens’s Great Expectations　 3. Finding a Life: Eliot’s Silas Marner　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 4. How Not to Be Parented: New Men in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice Part II: Consumer Culture 5. Soft Sell: Marketing Rhetoric in Feminist Criticism 6. Make up Your Mind: Scenes from the Psychology of Selling and Consumption 7. The Uses of Shopping: Richard Hoggart Goes to Woolworth’s 8. Scenes of Shopping 9. Buying the Baby, Growing Your Own　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Part III: Feminist Directions 10. Fifty Fifty: Female Subjectivity and the Danaids 11. Domestication 12. ‘We’re Getting There’: Woolf and Feminist Criticism 13. Untold Stories in Mrs Dalloway 14. ‘I Had Barbara’: Women’s Ties and Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’ Acknowledgements Index

Reviews

Everyone loves reading Rachel Bowlby. The immersion in these unexpected discussions - of family, generations, parenthood, shopping, marketing, feminism, literature and life - is unbroken from start to finish, which was entirely to be expected.--Mark Currie, Queen Mary University of London

Author Information

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).

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