The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently

by Soper, Kate; Ryle, Martin; Thomas, Lyn

• ISBN13: 9780230537286
• ISBN10: 0230537286
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This volume casts a critical eye on representations and practices of consumption in the Western world. It offers a unique contemporary perspective on the themes of counter-consumerism, ecological crisis and sustainability that are rising fast on the political and cultural agenda.

Author Biography

KATE SOPER is Professor of Philosophy at London Metropolitan University, UK. She is well known for her work on the philosophy of nature and as a theorist of need and consumption, and has recently been a lead researcher in the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption Programme. She is co-editor (with Frank Trentmann) of Citizenship and Consumption.
 
MARTIN RYLE is Reader in the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex, UK, where he teaches literature and cultural studies. He has published and edited books and articles on a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth-century writing.
 
LYN THOMAS is Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of European Transformations, London Metropolitan University, UK. She is the author of Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and her Audience, Fans, Feminisms and Quality Media and Annie Ernaux, la premire personne.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	p. vii
Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Counter-Consumerist Concern	p. 1
Texts and Representations
Representing Consumers: Contesting Claims and Agendas	p. 25
The Past, the Future and the Golden Age: Some Contemporary Versions of Pastoral	p. 43
Ecochic: Green Echoes and Rural Retreats in Contemporary Lifestyle Magazines	p. 59
Mediated Culture and Exemptionalism	p. 74
Value, Hedonism, Critique
The Bohemian Habitus: New Social Theory and Political Consumerism	p. 93
Sustainable Hedonism: The Pleasures of Living within Environmental Limits	p. 113
Green Pleasures	p. 130
Everyday Consumption
Happiness and the Consumption of Mobility	p. 157
Gendering Anti-Consumerism: Alternative Genealogies, Consumer Whores and the Role of Ressentiment	p. 171
Growing Sustainable Consumption Communities: The Case of Local Organic Food Networks	p. 188
Conclusion
Conclusion	p. 209
Index	p. 213
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