Waste and Abundance: The Measure of Consumption

Current headlines demonstrate that our widespread search for abundance has become a source of general concern. The press now abounds in debates about waste management, patterns of consumption and production, where these issues mainly articulate themselves in anecdotal or catastrophist modes. This collection breaks away from such approaches and shows that literature provides a precious insight into the underlying cultural, social and political mechanisms that shape attitudes to waste and abundance in Western Europe and North America. The collection conceptualizes the tensions between waste and abundance (as represented in literature), which are established as an entry-point into understanding the evolution of social and political structures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.