Rachel Bowlby
Biographic Data
| ID | 256396 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Bowlby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Bowlby |
| SIGNATURE | BOWLBY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7759-6621 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The feeding of the five thousand
This thought piece considers some of the diverse meanings and history of distribution, as a concept and a practice. Beginning with perspectives from early economic theory – Adam Smith and David Ricardo – it moves on to look at models of the social and geographical distribution of goods and services that were current in the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the New Testament story of Jesus miraculously supplying a crowd with food offers a highly ecc…
Rachel Bowlby - Unexpected Items
The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women’s defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and changing forms of parenthood, the essays in this volume delve into some of the mutat…
Rachel Bowlby - Unexpected Items
Fifty Fifty
This chapter showcases the mythical Danaids—the fifty ‘daughters of Danaus’-- as an advertisement, if one were needed, for the historical neglect of old stories about women – compared to old stories about men. Eternally labouring at a domestic task that can never be completed (they have to fill leaky containers), the Danaids have been regularly ignored—unlike Sisyphus, famously rolling his boulder up the hill, with equal futility but somehow (in …
Rachel Bowlby – Unexpected Items
The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women’s defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood, this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing…
Virginia Woolf and Capitalism
Refines our understanding of Virginia Woolf as a politically engaged writer Refines our understanding of Woolf as politically-engaged writer, by asking specific questions about her engagement with history, labour and economics Contributors mobilise a range of approaches to Woolf’s work, ranging from the archival, to the creative, to the pedagogical Takes in the full gamut of Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction oeuvre, with a focus on Woolf’s less-stu…
Back to the Shops
The uses of shopping
In The Uses of Literacy and in the many autobiographical works of his later years, Richard Hoggart wrote about shops and shopping. Taking a distance from the adverse stance of the mid-century literary world to ‘consumer society’ in all its forms, Hoggart consistently represented himself as someone who liked to shop. This essay looks at the changing shopping experiences that Hoggart described, and at the rare distinctiveness of this lifelong inter…
Afterword
Two or three things
Talking Walking
Virginia Woolf
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Half Art”
This article considers Baudelaire's essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne as a possible response to the question of why art matters. Baudelaire's exhilarating innovation is to downgrade the significance of eternal value in art, in favour of what he designates its other half, the fleeting presentness that is modernity. Baudelaire explores this idea through a mock-anonymous celebration of the artist Constantin Guys, referred to as M. G., whose prolifi…
Introduction
Half Art
This article considers Baudelaire's essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne as a possible response to the question of why art matters. Baudelaire's exhilarating innovation is to downgrade the significance of eternal value in art, in favour of what he designates its other half, the fleeting presentness that is modernity. Baudelaire explores this idea through a mock-anonymous celebration of the artist Constantin Guys, referred to as M. G., whose prolifi…
Derrida's Dying Oedipus
In Of Hospitality, Derrida used Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus to think about the suppliant exile, Oedipus, as an old man seeking to die in his own way in a foreign country. He focuses on Oedipus' placing of trust in the Athenian ruler, Theseus, and his anticipation of the impossibility of being mourned by Antigone and Ismene, the daughters to whom the secret of his deathplace, known to Theseus, is not to be divulged. Though it is otherwise the pr…
Freudian Mythologies
More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex — child, mother, father — suited the nuclear families of the mid-20th century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus,…
Freudian Mythologies
Fifty–Fifty
Psychoanalysis
The fact that people keep intruding into their own investigations of antiquity can, depending on the questions one asks, appear to be a nuisance. But many approaches turn this into a virtue by making their own presence in the examination of the Hellenic world the immediate object of their study. Freudian psychoanalysis, as this article argues, is a programmatic example of the process because, while it is fundamentally introspective, it is articul…
Speech Creatures
This piece takes its cue from Malcolm Bowie's 'speech creatures', at once Aristotelian and psychoanalytic, to compare two forceful male characters in English novels who each make speeches proclaiming their own emotional reformation. Different as they are in other respects - an ex-libertine and a man of morals - Samuel Richardson's 'Mr B.' (in Pamela) and Jane Austen's Mr Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice) both denounce their early parental education …
Where Ignorance is Bliss’
In the years and months that led up to the ‘Folly’ conference in July 2007, I found that I developed a fairly compulsive habit of noting down every time the word turned up in something that I was reading. I think I must have been hoping for general enlightenment on the subject, but in reality it seemed I was simply building up a rather dull and predictable empirical confirmation of the hunch that it was in the eighteenth century that folly had it…
Freudian Mythologies
"This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies - Oedipus and others - which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands of his stories of how children develop and how people change (or …
I Had Barbara
Research Article| December 01 2006 “I Had Barbara”: Women's Ties and Wharton's “Roman Fever” Rachel Bowlby Rachel Bowlby Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (2006) 17 (3): 37-51. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-010 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Rachel Bowlby; “I Had Barbara”: Women's Ties and Wharton's “Roman Fever”. differences 1 December…
Of Spirit
The Problem with no Name
On an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, 'the problem.' And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. (Friedan, 1963: 15)1
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Soft sell
Promoting Dorian Gray
These words, spoken by a character in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), grant to a much-maligned weed a status possibly higher than any it has known before or since, and may well strike the late twentieth-century reader as rather strong. In representing the cigarette not only as a pleasure, but as the very quintessence of pleasure, they make the kind of exorbitant claim associated not so much with the refinement of aestheticism as …
The Feminine Female
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published in 1949, was in some ways a book before its time. It inaugurated the discussion of themes that were taken up actively only with the beginning of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement, towards the end of the 60s. Basic political rights for women, secured in most states by the 40s, had failed to achieve much more than the nominal recognition of the principle that gender and citizenship wer…
S Feminism
Just looking
Secsexecs
These words are taken from the June issue of Working Woman, a magazine aimed at women with business ambitions which has been running since October, 1984.1 called this paper 'Secsexecs' on the basis of a Working Woman article entitled 'From Sec to Exec' which gives brief accounts of the moves along this line made by a dozen exemplary working women. It is a crucial transition in the magazine's image of women — both in that it is a transition, invol…
Promoting Dorian Gray
These words, spoken by a character in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), grant to a much-maligned weed a status possibly higher than any it has known before or since, and may well strike the late twentieth-century reader as rather strong. In representing the cigarette not only as a pleasure, but as the very quintessence of pleasure, they make the kind of exorbitant claim associated not so much with the refinement of aestheticism as …
The Problem with no Name
On an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, 'the problem.' And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. (Friedan, 1963: 15)1
The Problem with No Name
Flight Reservations
Flight of Spirit
Virginia Woolf
Of Spirit
Uneven Developments
Soft sell
Die endliche und die unendliche Schwangerschaft
Two by three
Who's Framing Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language
Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language
Of Spirit
A happy event
Scenes from consumer psychology
Still crazy after all these years
The Reading of Silence
The Inhuman
Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious
Art (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Literature (14 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · History (12 works) · Psychoanalysis (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works)