Consuming Fantasies

Consuming Fantasies
Author: Lise Sanders
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0814210171

"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 study will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Victorian and Edwardian life and literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Ladies' Pages

Ladies' Pages
Author: Noliwe M. Rooks
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813534251

Noliwe M. Rooks's Ladies' Pages sheds light on the most influential African American women's magazines--Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion, Half-Century Magazine for the Colored Homemaker, Tan Confessions, Essence, and O, the Oprah Magazine--and their little-known success in shaping the lives of black women. Ladies' Pages demonstrates how these rare and thought-provoking publications contributed to the development of African American culture and the ways in which they in turn reflect important historical changes in black communities.

Temples of Luxury

Temples of Luxury
Author: Lise Sanders
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 100092727X

This two-volume collection of British primary sources examines institutions such as hotels, inns, arcades, bazaars, co-operatives, shops and department stores in the long nineteenth century, which were often coded as ‘luxurious’. This period was marked not only by an increase of individual consumerism but also by the institutionalisation of opulent, often purpose-built spaces such as the much-admired new grand hotels, supposedly an American invention, and department stores, modelled on the French grands magasins. These environments were tied to leisure (no longer a prerogative of the upper classes) and thus to modernity. In addition to addressing the luxurious side of these institutions, including architectural innovation and interior decoration, we also consider the other side of luxury, examining the experience of staff and period debates over the morality of consumption. This edition seeks to explore a fascinating but hitherto often neglected side of the British nineteenth century by bringing together a collection of annotated primary texts and visual material documenting these ‘temples of luxury’ as they were seen by their contemporaries.

THE FANTASY OF FAITH

THE FANTASY OF FAITH
Author: Rogene A. Buchholz
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2023-08-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

In a nutshell, Christianity is one of the greatest if not the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on people in the history of the universe. It is practically all fantasy of one sort of another that millions of people believe in all over the world and have done so for many centuries since Christianity began. It all could have been made up out of whole cloth. The Old Testament cannot be taken at face value as the creation story was most likely borrowed from other sources and adapted to fit with the author’s purpose of explaining how the world began. The Exodus may be entirely fiction and most certainly did not happen the way it is described in the Bible. As far as the New Testament is concerned, it was written decades after the crucifixion of Jesus by people who were not eyewitnesses to the events they described. There may have been a prophet whose teachings drew many followers, but there was certainly no virgin birth, no miracles, and no resurrection. The purpose of all the apocalyptic writing and second coming of Christ may have been motivated by the oppression of the Roman Empire where the Jewish people felt powerless and needed to believe in something that would provide them with a feeling that in the final analysis justice would be done and they would get their revenge. Thus, Christianity needs to be exposed for the fraud that it is which is what this book attempts to do by looking at the history of Christianity, Biblical scholarship, and other aspects of Christianity along with its alternatives.

The Candidate

The Candidate
Author: Zareh Vorpouni
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2016-10-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0815653794

The Candidate is one of the most masterful, psychologically penetrating novels in Armenian diaspora literature. Published in 1967 at a time of political awakening among the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide, the novel explores themes of trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation, friendship, and sacrifice, and examines the relationship between victim and perpetrator. The book opens in 1927 in Paris after Minas has found his friend Vahakn’s body on the floor of the apartment they share. In a fragmentary way, Minas tells of his meeting Vahakn in the cafés of the Latin Quarter; the friendship that joins them; their conversations with Ziya, a Turkish student in Paris; Vahakn’s murder of Ziya; and Vahakn’s suicide. At the core of the novel is the note Vahakn leaves Minas to explain the enigma of Ziya’s murder and his own suicide. The letter recounts Vahakn’s and his mother’s deportation from their village in the Ottoman Empire; his mother’s death and Vahakn’s adoption by a Turkish woman, Fatma, who rapes and abuses him; his feelings of alienation and self-estrangement in France; and his inability to adapt to life after trauma. Known for his innovation of the Western Armenian novel, Vorpouni challenges the narrative elements of the conventional novel by playing with subjectivity and linearity. His melding of contemporary French literary and intellectual currents produces a literary and cultural hybrid unique in Western Armenian literature.

The Urban Department Store in America, 1850–1930

The Urban Department Store in America, 1850–1930
Author: Dr Louisa Iarocci
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2014-12-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 140944743X

In the late nineteenth century, the urban department store arose as a built artifact and as a social institution in the United States. While the physical building type is the foundation of this comprehensive architectural study, Iarocci reaches beyond the analysis of the brick and mortar to reconsider how the ‘spaces of selling’ were culturally-produced spaces, as well as the product of interrelated economic, social, technological and aesthetic forces.

School Music Education and Social Change in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan

School Music Education and Social Change in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan
Author: Wai-chung Ho
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2011
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9004189173

This book compares, from a historical and sociopolitical perspective, the respective systems and contents of music education in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in response to globalization, localization and Sinificiation, with particular reference to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei.

Night Raiders

Night Raiders
Author: Eloise Moss
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2019-07-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198840381

Night Raiders is the first history of burglary in modern Britain. Until 1968, burglary was defined in law as occurring only between the 'night-time' hours of nine pm and six am in residential buildings. Time and space gave burglary a unique cloak of terror, since burglars' victims were likely to be in the bedroom, asleep and unawares, when the intruder crept in, prowling near them in the darkness. Yet fear sometimes gave way to sexual fantasy; eroticized visions of handsome young thieves sneaking around the boudoirs of beautiful, lonely heiresses emerged alongside tales of violence and loss in popular culture, confounding social commentators by casting the burglar as criminal hero. Night Raiders charts how burglary lay historically at the heart of national debates over the meanings of 'home', experiences of urban life, and social inequality. The book explores intimate stories of the devastation caused by burglars' presence in the most private domains, showing how they are deeply embedded within broader histories of capitalism and liberal democracy. The fear and fascination surrounding burglary were mobilized by media, state, and market to sell insurance and security technologies, whilst also popularising the crime in fiction, theatre, and film. Cat burglars' rooftop adventures transformed ideas about the architecture and policing of the city, and post-war 'spy-burglars' theft of information illuminated Cold War skirmishes across the capital. More than any other crime, burglary shaped the everyday rhythms, purchases, and perceptions of modern urban life.