Tune in to HGTV, visit your local bookstore's magazine section, or flip to the 'Homes' section of your weekend newspaper, and it becomes clear: domestic spaces play an immense role in our cultural consciousness. The Domestic Space Reader addresses our collective fascination with houses and homes by providing the first comprehensive survey of the concept across time, cultures, and disciplines. This pioneering anthology, which is ideal for students and general readers, features writing by key scholars, thinkers, and writers including Gaston Bachelard, Mary Douglas, Le Corbusier, Homi Bhabha, Henri Lefebvre, Mrs. Beeton, Ma Thanegi, Diana Fuss, Beatriz Colomina, and Edith Wharton. Among the many engaging topics explored are: the impact of domestic technologies on family life; the relationship between religion and the home; nomadic peoples and housing; domestic spaces in art and literature; and the history of the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The Domestic Space Reader demonstrates how discussions of domestic spaces can help us better understand our inner lives and challenge our perceptions of life in particular times and places.

This volume takes forward the debate about 19th-century domestic space, drawing on economic history and literary criticism. To date, studies of 19th-century domestic space have discussed a feminized, middle class sphere, often using domestic guides and fictional representations of domesticity to generate their arguments.

Housing is shaped by culturally-specific expectations about the kinds of architecture and furnishings that are appropriate; about how and where different activities should be carried out; and by and with whom. It is those expectations, and the wider social and cultural systems of which they are a part, that are explored in this volume. At the same time, the book as a whole argues two larger points: first, that while houses, households and families have in recent years become increasingly important as objects of inquiry in Greek and Roman contexts, their potential as sources of information about broader social-historical issues has yet to be fully realised; and second, that greater weight and independence should be given to material culture as a source for studying ancient history. The book will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and scholars.

Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space investigates the relationship between the built environment and the organisation of space. The contributors are classical and prehistoric archaeologists, anthropologists and architects, who from their different backgrounds are able to provide some important and original insights into this relationship.

This is a history of domestic space in Canada. Peter Ward looks at how spaces in the Canadian home have changed over the last three centuries, and how family and social relationships have shaped -- and been shaped by -- these changing spaces. A fundamental element of daily life for individuals and families is domestic privacy, that of individuals and that of the family or household.

In a volume that brings together a wide range of disciplines—art history, sociology, architecture, cultural anthropology, and environmental psychology—Irene Cieraad presents a collection of articles that focuses on the practices and symbolism of domestic space in Western society. These essays go beyond the discussion of conventional issues such as aesthetics and social standing. At Home takes an in-depth anthropological look at how different cultures use their homes as a visual model of the culture's social structure.

Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this book investigates how home is imagined, staged and experienced in western culture. Questions about meanings of ‘home’ and domestic culture are triggered by dramatic changes in values and ideals about the dwellings we live in and the dwellings we desire or dread. Deborah Chambers explores how home is idealised as a middle-class haven, managed as an investment, and signified as a status symbol and expression of personal identity. She addresses a range of public, state, commercial, popular and expert discourses about ‘home’: the heritage industry, design, exhibitions, television, social media, home mobilities and migration, smart technologies and ecological sustainability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research including cultural history and cultural geography, the book offers a distinctive media and cultural studies approach supported by original, historically informed case studies on interior and domestic design; exhibitions of model homes; TV home interiors; ‘media home’ imaginaries; multiscreen homes; corporate visions of ‘homes of tomorrow’ and digital smart homes. A comprehensive and engaging study, this book is ideal for students and researchers of cultural studies, cultural history, media and communication studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, cultural geography and design studies.