In "Sentimental Materialism" Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artifacts from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman s wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity the feminine...

In "Sentimental Materialism" Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artifacts from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman s wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity the feminine...