{"title":"Books by Rachel Bowlby","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780198874126","title":"Émile Zola","description":"Zola made it his aim to write novels exploring the many compartments and classes of modern French life in the later nineteenth century—and he went on to carry it out, with novels that look at the longings and troubles and everyday lives of people in their specific social milieux. Travelling through the varieties of Zola's styles and settings, realistic and comic and tragic and critical, from shopping to mining to the fertility business, this book is a guide to the different pleasures and modes of thinking to be found in reading Zola today.\n\nThe last part considers the different kinds of story involved in the final years of Zola's own life. It follows him first to England—to Upper Norwood, in south London, where he was in exile for almost a year in 1898-9, as a result of his intervention in the ongoing Dreyfus affair. Long letters home offer moving insights into Zola's whole way of being, in the intimacy of his daily life and his writing routines, set against the public events of the Dreyfus process that continue to resonate today.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57685936931189,"sku":"9780198874133","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56227146269045,"sku":"9780198874126","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780198874126.jpg?v=1792599185"},{"product_id":"9781399528412","title":"Rachel Bowlby – Unexpected Items","description":"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 manuals and newspaper stories, as well as novels and tragedies, from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading—of all kinds of text—as a historical method, showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions, and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman, the mother, the consumer, the parent—all human characters clash and change, and so do their likely stories.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368795746677,"sku":"9781399528412","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781399528412_bb3a92c1-8fd3-4d4f-b342-aa61fb193fba.jpg?v=1786019766"},{"product_id":"freudian-mythologies","title":"Freudian Mythologies","description":"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 fulfilment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex - child, mother, father - suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--'a likely story!'--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.\n\nThis 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 don't). both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57695182815605,"sku":"9780199566228","price":56.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780199566228.jpg?v=1793031756"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-rachel-bowlby.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}