Special Issue

Shopping Fictions: Representing Shops and Shopping in British Literature and Culture

Commodification, consumption, and consumer culture have long been core concepts in literary and cultural studies, spurred in no small part by the fields’ multiple Marxist turns across the twentieth century. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau remind us, each in their own way, the forms of art under global capitalism are increasingly tied up with everyday commodity production. As a result, critical notions of ‘consumption,’ the neoliberal conditions of shopping today, and processes of identity formation and political consciousness through shopping have proliferated across the humanities and social sciences, generating social anxieties tied to possibility, responsibility, and adequacy of choice only assuaged by the market itself—through advertising (Bauman 61-64). In literary studies, engagements with the structural parameters for consumption have long undergone intense scrutiny, from the early advent of consumerism in the fifteenth century (Baghdiantz McCabe 3), the formation of a recognizable “consumer society” in eighteenth-century Britain (McKendrick et al.) or in our current stage of “too late Capitalism” (Kornbluh). In interrogations of the different ways in which “[s]hopping is consuming our lives” (Zukin 7), representations of the practice of shopping have also received attention, if markedly less.

Among others, Krista Lysack has expertly outlined how Victorian women’s writing refused neat categorizations for female shoppers, imagining them “from transgressive domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical” (12)—indeed a development with deep roots in the eighteenth century (Kowaleski-Wallace). The different imaginations of shoppers across nineteenth and early twentieth-century-literature are of course vast, encompassing divergent representations like the (colonial) transnationalization of taste in 1820s’ silver-fork novels of Catherine Gore and others, but also Virginia Woolf’s “lack of direct commodity discourse in Mrs. Dalloway” (Abbott 210) a century later. Here we also think of Jean Rhys’ theorizations of how “the capitalist marketplace and its commodities manifest racial, gendered and imperial domination” in cities like London and Paris (Karl 14). From the mid-twentieth century onwards, pop cultural imaginations of shopping spaces have typically foregrounded the US American experience—with the mall, the main street, and the thrift store becoming iconic locations for modern lifestyle fantasies and negotiations of identity (Smiley; Zukin). Yet, questions of (national) identity and belonging have also been articulated via literary representations of shopping in post-World War II Britain as postcolonial writers like Sam Selvon in The Lonely Londoners (1956) or Grace Nichols in her poem “The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping” (1984) imagine London’s shops as either offering versions of Britishness to buy, or as spaces of creolization. Thus, although the practices of shopping might have “been left out of so much of social history”, literary and cultural imaginations of such “time-taking, everyday occupations that fall outside the established historical categories” (Bowlby 2115) continue to provide means for negotiating politics, norms, values, and identities in (British) consumer culture.

This special issue redirects attention to how the spaces of shops and acts of shopping are written and represented on page, stage, or screen. Considering changing representations (and ideologies) of the act of shopping in British literature and culture since the early 1800s, contributions might cover genres ranging from the silver fork novel to Modernist explorations of the department store, to in-yer-face theater and (reality) TV. Articles might either focus on individual texts, themes, or spaces in literature, film, and TV, such as the bookstore—Notting Hill (1999), The Bookshop (2017)—or haute couture boutiques—The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (2000)—or on broader questions of consumerism and consumption throughout British literature and film.

We invite contributions that include but are not limited to the following topics: 

• representations of spaces and acts of shopping.
• historical visions and revisions of consumerism in British literature and film.
• literary renditions of fashion discourses (buying, dressing) across time.
• acts of spending, depictions of luxury goods.
• fictional reimaginations of consumer culture.
• the role of consumption vis-à-vis race, gender, class, and sexuality (consumption as exploitation and Othering).
• shopping and creolization: creolizing shopping practices vs. shopping to assimilate.
• global (re)imaginations of abolitionism and sugar boycotts.
• transactional ethics and aesthetics in British literature and film.
• critical readings of neoliberalism, selfhood, citizenship, and shopping.
• affective and/or cultural shopping.
• seasonal shopping, shopping for holidays like Christmas.
• discussions on shopping objects: from (neo-)Victorian materiality and paraphernalia to the contemporary literary merch industry.

Prospective authors may also want to consider the following contemporary examples:

• The character of the modiste in Bridgerton (2020-).
• The spaces of the bookstore and the flea market in Notting Hill (1999).
• Shopping and creolization in postcolonial British writing such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956).
• Consumer culture in reality TV (Mary Queen of Shops, Shoplife, The Salon, etc.).
• The department store in TV series like Mr. Selfridge (2013).
• Broad depictions of fashion and shopping in neo-Victorian shows such as Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (2023).
• Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic novel series (2000-2019)—also adapted into movies.
• Gemma Townley’s Learning Curves: A Novel of Sex, Suits, and Business Affairs (2007).

Contributors to this special issue are expected to submit a 300 to 400-word abstract along with a 150-word bio note by January 15, 2026 to Paula Barba Guerrero (paulabarbaguerrero@usal.es), Felipe Espinoza Garrido (espinoza.garrido@uni-muenster.de), and Dorit Neumann (dorit.neumann@uni-muenster.de).

We have tentative interest from a major literary studies journal for this special issue. Full articles should be no more than 10,000 words, including references and notes.

Estimated publication date: 2027 to 2028.

Works Cited

Abbott, Reginald. “What Miss Kilman’s Petticoat Means: Virginia Woolf, Shopping, and Spectacle.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1992, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 193–216.

Bowlby, Rachel. “The uses of shopping: Richard Hoggart goes to Woolworth’s.” Textual  Practice, 2021, vol. 35, no. 12, pp. 2111–27.

Baghdiantz McCabe, Ina.  A History of Global Consumption: 1500–1800. Routledge, 2014.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Open University Press, 1988.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. U of California P, 1988.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodernism and its Discontents, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, Verso, 1988, pp. 192-205.

Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso, 2024.

Karl, Alissa G. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen. Routledge, 2013.

Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. Columbia UP, 1997.

Lysack, Krista. Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing. Ohio UP, 2008.

McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Indiana UP, (1982) 1985.

Smiley, David. Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956. U of Minnesota P, 2013.

Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. Routledge, 2005.