This book is about the experiences and also the polarities of shopping and the home. It analyses the ways in which the agencies and discourses of the retail environment mesh with the processes of physical and imaginative re-creation that constitute the domestic space, teasing out the negotiations and interactions that mediate this key arena.The study examines how the strategies of retailers were both arbitrated by and negotiated through the actions and desires of the homemaker as consumer. Organised around four key themes (retail arenas and the everyday, identity and lifestyle, fashioning domestic space, and cultural practice), the ten case studies cover a range of cultural encounters and locations from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century.
