Out in Paperback / Architecture and Suburbia

Architecture and Suburbia -- From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000 by John Archer, Minnesota UP '05, 470 pages, ISBN #0816643040. Index, permissions, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The author, cultural studies professor at the University of Minnesota, writes that the evolution of the American suburban dream house stretches back to the 18th century and borrows much from bourgeois England. His table of contents nicely summarizes the book's three-part sweep:

Part I -- Eighteenth-Century England: The Genesis of the Bourgeois Dwelling, including subsections: Locating the Self in Space, Villa Suburbana, Terra Suburbana, and The Apparatus of Selfhood.

Part II -- Nineteenth-Century America: Republican Homes in Arcadian Suburbs, including subsections: Republican  Pastoral: Toward a bourgeois arcadia and suburbanizing the self.

Part III -- Twentieth-Century America: The Dream House Ideal and the Suburban Landscape, including subsections: Nationalizing the Dream, Analyzing the Dream, Conclusion: Reframing Suburbia; and Coda: Looking Ahead.