Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping [Paperback]

Rachel Bowlby is a professorial shopper. Her previous books have included Shopping with Freud and Just Looking; Carried Away, her latest eagle-eyed foray into the consumerist abyss, acts as something of a catchall. Opening with the spectral image of IKEA shoppers frozen in purgatorial queues when the tills break down, she traces the rise and rise of the supermarket, principally in the United States, Britain and France. From 19th-century arcades via department store grandeur to supermarket ubiquity, Bowlby delves into the bargain bin of antiquated retail manuals to entertainingly illustrate the development of mass retailing alongside the development of popular psychology. They contain achingly purple prose: recommending rest areas, one 1931 stylist advised "This is a good spot, too, for a radio or a canary", and a 1963 article diagnosed that "Somewhere in that head, among the bobbypins, the hairdo, the perfume, and the problems, there is a thing that makes calculations and decisions". The gender assumption was female, or "housewife", synonymously. For the newlywed, going down the aisle had added connotations.

Bowlby wisely demonstrates greater restraint, and instead focuses instructively on the "silent salesmen" of shop windows and packaging, the role of the passer-by, market research, cheap books, bar codes, and the darker world of kleptomania and shopping addiction. While shrewdly examining the "food for thought" relationship between literature and the supermarket (Don DeLillo's White Noise still proves supremely prescient), sadly there is no discussion of cinema, and scant consideration is given to the virtual supermarkets of e-commerce, where the screen replaces the aisle, intelligent chips, or the increasing power of "green" shoppers and resurgent local markets. However, if there is still room in her trolley, perhaps that's inevitable. In basing her erudite analysis on period texts rather than semiotic vagaries, Bowlby allows her reader to accompany the Shopper from the jolly cavorting of the early "Big Bear" supermarket prototypes to the cacophonic jungle of modern retail, from passive dummies to the sado-masochistic empowerment of the Consumer, where you have nothing to lose but your change. --David Vincent

Carried Away is in some ways a rare opportunity to go on an intellectual shopping spree, a guided tour of consumerism with a premier cultural critic. Times Literary Supplement [An] intriguing exploration of shoppers and shops from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews A virtuoso cultural history of 20th-century shopping... Bowlby's sensitivity to shopping's confusing alliance of exhiliration, zombification, larks and boredom prevents her from resorting to easy generalisation. Independent on Sunday Full of evocative and entertaining material. New Statesman Bowlby has scoured the archives of marketing history to write a lively and thought-provoking study of 20th-century shopping. Financial Times [An] engrossing history of postindustrial consumerism... This deft mixture of sociology, cultural criticism and literary scholarship is an important contribution to feminist and cultural studies. Publishers Weekly --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Is shopping an exercise in consumer freedom - or in corporate manipulation? It takes up a good deal of our time and a great deal of our imagination, but as consumers we know all too little about the hidden aspects of shopping: how our intimate, complex relationship with department stores and supermarkets affects our lives every minute of the day.

In this fascinating look at a largely unexamined corner of our lives, Rachel Bowlby untangles some of our convoluted ideas about shopping and consuming. Ranging from 1940s trade journals to The Stepford Wives and novels by Zola, Virginia Woolf and Don Delillo, Carried Away traces the transformations in the shopper from the days of the glamorous department store to our own functionalist superstores and tells us not a little about the changing roles of women and men along the way. It is a witty and revelatory book that shines a light into the darkest corners of the shop-window.

Rachel Bowlby's books include Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis, which the New Statesman called 'a brilliant and shrewd, but also an intoxicatingly hopeful book', and Shopping with Freud, described by Suzanne Moore as 'a brilliant piece of literary criticism . . . a fascinating and seductive book'. Currently at the University of York, she previously taught at Sussex and Oxford after graduate work at Yale.