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During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.
Much has been written about the housing policies of the Depression and the Postwar period. Much less has been written of the houses built as a result of these policies, or the lives of the families who lived in them. Using the houses of Levittown, Long Island, as cultural artifacts, this book examines the relationship between the government-sponsored, mass-produced housing built after World War II, the families who lived in it, and the society that fostered it. Beginning with the basic four-room, slab-based Cape Cods and Ranches, Levittown homeowners invested time and effort, barter and money in the expansion and redesign of their houses. The author shows how this gradual process has altered the socioeconomic nature of the community as well, bringing Levittown fully into the mainstream of middle-class America. This book works on several levels. For planners, it offers a reassessment of the housing policies of the 1940s and '50s, suggesting that important lessons remain to be learned from the Levittown experience. For historians, it offers new insights into the nature of the suburbanization process that followed World War II. And for those who wish to understand the subtle workings of their own domestic space within their lives, it offers food for speculation.
This book explores how notions of suburbia have developed in our collective imagination, examining novels, cinema, popular music and television in the US and UK.
A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.
This collection of critical essays explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish suburbia, and the historical, social and aesthetic contexts in which these cultures have emerged. The lived experience and the artistic representation of Irish suburbia have received relatively little scholarly consideration and this multidisciplinary volume redresses this critical deficit. It significantly advances the nascent socio-historical field of Irish suburban studies, while simultaneously disclosing and establishing a history of suburban Irish literary and visual culture. The essays also challenge conventional conceptions of what constitutes the proper domain of Irish writing and art and reveal that, though Irish suburban experience is often conceived of pejoratively by writers and artists, there are also many who register and valorise the imaginative possibilities of Irish suburbia and the meanings of its social and cultural life.
A multidisciplinary team of specialists list historical and contemporary research on suburbanization with particular emphasis on the UK, North America, Australia and South Africa.
Lower-Middle-Class Nation provides an unparalleled interdisciplinary cultural history of the lower-middle-class worker in British life since 1850. Considering highbrow, lowbrow, and middle-brow forms across literature, film, television and more, Nicola Bishop traces the development of the lower-middle-class from the mid-19th century to the present day, tackling a number of pressing, consistent concerns such as automation, commuting, and the search for a life/work balance. Above all, this book brings together ideas about class, nationhood, and gender, demonstrating that a particularly British lower-middle-class identity is constructed through the spaces and practices of the everyday. Aimed at undergraduate, postgraduates and scholars working in media and social history, literature, popular culture, cultural studies and sociology, Lower-Middle-Class Nation represents a new direction in cultural histories of work, labour, and leisure.
Originally published in hardcover in 2013.
Dreaming Suburbia is a cultural and historical interpretation of the political economy of postwar American suburbanization.