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Buying Happiness: The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada by Bettina Liverant (review)

writing about Canada has been adequately covered by Françoise Lejeune’s 2012 The Feminine Experience in the Margins of the British Empire; her study, though, published by Edwin Mellen Press, looks primarily at a handful of well-known writers, such as Susanna Moodie, Frances Wright, Catherine Parr Traill, and Anna Jameson. Furthermore, while much can be inferred about masculinity from the writings Little explores, he refrains from giving gender as much weight as he does other categories, a choice based primarily on his argument that men’s use of the picturesque (a genre he argues has been associated with women’s travel writing) makes gender somehow less salient. Such an argument, though, at the very least does not take into account the different degrees of ease with which white, middleclass men travelled in the nineteenth century. Moreover, rather than provide more nuance to the frameworks set out by earlier scholars in the field who analyzed the imperial dimensions of men’s travel writings, Little instead prefers simply to contradict them (particularly Mary Louise Pratt’s work). Yet, much recent scholarship in journals such as Studies in Travel Writing and Journal of Tourism History on the history of gender, travel, tourism, and imperialism has provided such nuance, demonstrating that the theoretical baby need not be thrown out with (or by) the empirical bathwater. It is, I think, telling that those previously published essays in this book did not appear in such journals: a different set of readers might have pushed Little to refine or complicate his arguments and insights.