ABSTRACT
Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day is a book about the experiences of shopping and the tensions and polarities that exist between the retail and domestic environments. As recent work has emphasized, the workplace, the shop and the home form key arenas in which identities and practices are formed, shaped and negotiated. Yet conceptualizing these spaces as discrete entities remains problematic. Academic enquiry still tends to address the sites of retailing, consumption and use in a separate manner and where attempts have been made to provide linkage or common ground they have tended to be rooted in discussions of contemporary cultural practice.1 This collection seeks to collapse these distinctions by analysing 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. We argue that the nexus that exists between domestic and retail spaces, often viewed as a corollary of purely mundane cultural practice, needs to be critically reappraised if we are to understand how middle-class and plebeian homes were culturally apprehended in both past and current experience.
