Market à la Mode

This book deserves the widest possible audience. Its ultimate goal is no less than the full excavation of the modern, gendered, bourgeois subject. After reading this book, it is impossible to shop, drink coffee, or even read the newspaper without critical reflection on how these activities contribute to our deepest sense of self. Rooted in the eighteenth century, Market à la Mode can show us who we are and how we came to be.

Upper-division undergraduates through faculty will find... this thoughtful well-researched work... useful.

This is an impressive work of synthesis and argument, an important contribution to the burgeoning field of cultural materialism in eighteenth-century studies.

This is one of the best books on an eighteenth-century topic—one of the most ambitious, original, significant, timely, engaging, carefully argued, sophisticated, and lucidly complex—that I have read in the last ten years.