Cultural Ideals of Home

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.

Deborah Chambers is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, UK. Her most recent publications include Changing Media, Homes and Households (2016), Social Media and Personal Relationships (2013) and A Sociology of Family Life (2012).

Introduction: themes and issues 1 Heritage homes 2 Idealising homes and homemaking 3 Domestic modernity in suburbia 4 Early media homes 5 Property dramas and home makeovers 6 Home time in multiscreen homes 7 Alternative domesticities 8 Home mobilities and migration 9 Homes of the future 10 Sustainable homes