Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700-1914

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Synopsis

This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.

Book details

Series:
Routledge Studies in Cultural History
Author:
Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen, Anne Montenach
ISBN:
9781317611363
Related ISBNs:
9781315750170, 9780367208752, 9780367208752, 9781138803169, 9781138803169
Publisher:
Taylor and Francis
Pages:
276
Reading age:
Not specified
Includes images:
No
Date of addition:
2020-02-15
Usage restrictions:
Copyright
Copyright date:
2015
Copyright by:
N/A 
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Social Studies