Consuming Consumption

This essay reviews four recent works examining the cultural politics of consumption. It explores the methodological and theoretical distinctions and commonalities between three works which share an historical focus. It notes the different emphases suggested by historians, sociologists, and literary critics but emphasises their shared concern with understanding the complex agency of consumption as it is can be found specifically in cultural representations. The essay also notes the persistence of the theoretical divide between these historical studies, which identify consumption as a site of ambivalent possibility and even resistance, and contemporary accounts that regard it as a site of commodification and expropriation of the self.