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From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy considers representations of the female shopper in British women’s writing and demonstrates how women’s shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription, showing how women writers emphasize consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than the condition of seduction or loss. Krista Lysack examines works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, in order to challenge the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite.

Come Buy, Come Buy considers not only literary works, but also a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women’s fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping). With this wealth of sources, Lysack traces a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.

In Conspicuous Bodies: Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie, Jean Kane re-examines the literature of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie from a post-secularist perspective, arguing that their respective religions hold critical importance in their works. Though Joyce and Rushdie were initially received as cosmopolitans, both authors subsequently reframed their public images and aligned themselves instead with a provincial religious identity, which emphasized the interconnections between religious devotion and embodiment. At the same time, both Joyce and Rushdie managed to resist the doctrinal content of their religions.
 
Conspicuous Bodies presents Joyce as a founder and Rushdie as an inheritor of a distinctive discourse of belief about the importance of physical bodies and knowledge in religious practice. In doing so, it moves the reception of Joyce and Rushdie away from what previous critics have emphasized—away from questions of aesthetics and from  a narrow understanding of belief—and instead questions the assumption that belief should be segregated from matters of physicality and knowledge. Kane reintroduces the concept of spiritual embodiment in order to expand our understanding of what counts as spiritual agency in non-western and minority literatures.

This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions.

Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.