A Cultural History of the Home in the Modern Age

Despina Stratigakos

Hardcover |17.02 x 1.4 x 24.26 cm | 264 pp

Bloomsbury | 2022 | 9781472584304

Exploring the place of, and the cultural practices associated with, the home from 1920 to the present day. 

In the last century, our understandings of home have changed profoundly in the
wake of revolutionary new technologies and communications, medical advances, global wars and migration, celebrity and consumer cultures, liberation movements, and redefinitions of marriage and family. The rapidity of social transformation in this era has evoked feelings of possibility in the disruption of norms but also of unease in the dissolution of traditions. These changes have also challenged dominant ideologies of private and public spheres and revealed the porous boundaries between home and the world beyond.

The essays in this volume explore the home’s centrality in debates since the end of the First World War about our identities, resources, hopes, and anxieties as individuals and communities. In their analyses of the complexity and elusiveness of meanings of home, the physical materiality of the home – its objects, spaces, and
layout – comes under close scrutiny.