Cathedrals of Consumption. The European Department Store 1850 - 1939

Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999.

Serge JAUMAIN, Geoffrey CROSSICK (éds.)

Résumé

The history of the department store has moved into the limelight in recent years. After many decades in which it was almost exclusively historians of retailing and company biographers who were interested in the phenomenon, the department store has now come to attract the attention of historians of culture, consumption, gender, urban life and much more. Indeed, the department store in its classic era of expansive growth has often seemed better than anything else to embody the cultural and social modernity of its time.

The articles in this book range widely in presenting the breadth of these new approaches to department store history. An introductory essay explores the questions that surround the department store from its appearance in the mid-19th century, through its golden age in the decades before the World War I, to the challenges posed in the more competitive world of interwar Europe. A dozen contributors - writing about Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Hungary - then examine themes as varied as the new public space which department stores provided for women, the politics of consumption, the architecture of the new stores, the training of the workforce, the cult of shopping, advertising strategies, shoplifting, employer organizations, and the geographical spread of the new stores, while a comparison with 18th-century London raises the question of just how new the department store was.

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Commande

Amazon.fr

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Revue de presse

Petite histoire du grand bazar, La Libre Belgique, 15/01/2002.

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Table des matières

- List of tables
- List of figures and plates
- Notes on contributors
- Preface

1) The world of the department store: distribution, culture and social change – Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain

2) The newness of the department store: a view from the eighteenth century – Claire Walsh

3) Department stores as retail innovation in Germany: a historical-geographical perspective on the period 1870-1914 – Tim Coles

4) 'Doing the shops' at Christmas: women, men and the department store in England, c. 1880-1914 – Christopher P. Hosgood

5) Marianne in the department store: gender and the politics of consumption in turn-of-the-century Paris – Lisa Tiersten

6) Theft and thieves in German department stores, 1895-1930: a discourse on morality, crime and gender – Uwe Spiekermann

7) Selling dreams: advertising strategies from grands magasins to supermarkets in Ghent, 1900-1960 – Donald Weber

8) Acts of consumption: musical comedy and the desire of exchange – Erika D. Rappaport

9) Department stores and middle-class consumerism in Budapest, 1896-1939 – Gabor Gyani

10) Les Magasins Reunis: from the provinces to Paris, from art nouveau to art deco – Catherine Coley

11) From Messel to Mendelsohn: German department store architecture in defence of urban and economic change – Kathleen James

12) Training sales personnel in France between the wars – Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel

13) Employers' organisations in French department stores during the inter-war period: between conservatism and innovation – Laurence Badel

- Index