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list price: $89.95
edition:Hardcover
also available: eBook Paperback
category: History
published: Jun 2018
ISBN:9780774835138
publisher: UBC Press

Buying Happiness

The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada

by Bettina Liverant

tagged: post-confederation (1867-)
Description

The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption. Liverant’s fresh approach connects the emergence and diffusion of these ideas with changes in political processes and social policy. As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination.

About the Author

Bettina Liverant

Contributor Notes

Bettina Liverant is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary. She has written extensively on Canadian consumer history, on corporate philanthropy, and on architecture for both academic and general audiences.

Editorial Reviews

Buying Happiness should be required reading for students of twentieth-century Canada.

— The Canadian Historical Review

Liverant makes a complex and insightful argument for a deep but largely unmarked change of perspective. Her synthesis of recent work on consumerism in Canada is illuminating. In highlighting the role of intellectuals and historic publications in constructing and reconstructing the social narratives that Canadians rely on to think about and develop personal and national identities, she gently invites present-day writers to reconsider their impact, and a more general readership to question how and why certain stories are told.

— Prairie History

The nearest dictionary to hand unhelpfully defines consumer as “one or that which consumes”. Bettina Liverant takes us beyond linguistic tautologies to give us a first-rate intellectual history of consumer society in Canada from late Victorian times to the post-war baby boom era.

— Canadian Business History Association

In that it looks at the idea of consumer society, Buying Happiness offers a welcome addition to the study of consumption. As such, Buying Happiness helps scholars recognize their own possible prejudices that they bring to the study of consumption.

— American Review of Canadian Studies

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