Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing

Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing PDF Author: T. Foster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing makes new connections between feminist criticism of domestic ideology in the nineteenth century, modernist women's experiments with literary form, contemporary feminist debates about the politics of location, and postmodern theories of social space. The book identifies a coherent transition of women's writing that transforms domestic ideologies of 'woman's place' by redefining the ideas about space that underlie that ideology. The result is to open the space of gender identity to new relations of class and race.

Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing

Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing PDF Author: T. Foster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book

Book Description
Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing makes new connections between feminist criticism of domestic ideology in the nineteenth century, modernist women's experiments with literary form, contemporary feminist debates about the politics of location, and postmodern theories of social space. The book identifies a coherent transition of women's writing that transforms domestic ideologies of 'woman's place' by redefining the ideas about space that underlie that ideology. The result is to open the space of gender identity to new relations of class and race.

Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing

Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing PDF Author: Elizabeth Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350063452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
For Virginia Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts and Gwendolyn Brooks, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and rural spaces and stage the interaction between the sublime and the mundane. Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary by their spiritual or emotional significance, and yet their very ordinariness remains part of their value. This book addresses the intersection of spirituality, things and places – both natural and built environments – in the work of these four women modernists. From the living pebbles in Mary Butts's memoir to the pencil sought in Woolf's urban pilgrimage in 'Street Haunting', the Christmas decorations crafted by children in H.D.'s autobiographical novel The Gift and Maud Martha's love of dandelions in Brooks's only novel, things indicate spiritual concerns in these writers' work. Elizabeth Anderson contributes to current debates around materiality, vitalism and post-secularism, attending to both mainstream and heterodox spiritual expressions and connections between the two in modernism. How we value our spaces and our world being one of the most pressing contemporary ethical and ecological concerns, this volume contributes to the debate by arguing that a change in our attitude towards the environment will not come from a theory of renunciation but through attachment to and regard for material things.

Modern Women, Modern Work

Modern Women, Modern Work PDF Author: Francesca Sawaya
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812237439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves. Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the present. Modern Women, Modern Work historicizes this discourse about the primitive labor of women and racial others and demonstrates how it has been adopted uncritically in contemporary accounts of professionalism, modernism, and modernity. Seeking to recuperate black and white women's contestations of the modern professions, Sawaya pairs selected novels with a broad range of nonfiction writings to show how differing narratives about the transition to modernity authorized women's professionalism in a variety of fields. Among the figures considered are Jane Addams, Ruth Benedict, Willa Cather, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Orne Jewett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Tarbell. In mapping out the constraints women faced in their writings and their work, and in tracing the slippery compromises they embraced and the brilliant adaptations they made, Modern Women, Modern Work boldly reenvisions the history of modern professionalism in the United States.

A History of the Modernist Novel

A History of the Modernist Novel PDF Author: Gregory Castle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. Drawing on American, English, Irish, Russian, French and German traditions, leading scholars challenge existing attitudes about realism and modernism and draw new attention to everyday life and everyday objects. In addition to its exploration of new forms such as the modernist genre novel and experimental historical novel, this book considers the novel in postcolonial, transnational and cosmopolitan contexts. A History of the Modernist Novel also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.

Extreme Domesticity

Extreme Domesticity PDF Author: Susan Fraiman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.

British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women's Literature

British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women's Literature PDF Author: Terri Mullholland
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317172094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Embraced for the dramatic opportunities afforded by a house full of strangers, the British boarding house emerged as a setting for novels published during the interwar period by a diverse range of women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf. To use the single room in the boarding house or bedsit, Terri Mullholland argues, is to foreground a particular experience. While the single room represents the freedoms of independent living available to women in the early twentieth century, it also marks the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives. By placing their characters in this transient space, women writers could explore women's changing social roles and complex experiences – amateur prostitution, lesbian relationships, extra-marital affairs, and abortion – outside traditional domestic narrative concerns. Mullholland presents new readings of works by canonical and non-canonical writers, including Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction written and read by women, the literature of the single room merges modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.

Responding to Domestic Violence

Responding to Domestic Violence PDF Author: Kate Seymour
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000846180
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
This book reflects on the problem of domestic violence by thinking critically about policy and practice responses. Moving beyond accounts of men’s violence embedded in metaphors of ‘good’ and ‘bad men’, or as the expressions of particular structures and practices, it initiates challenging conversations concerning the ways in which our embeddedness in gendered discourses shapes the responses that we imagine are possible and desirable. Innovative in its embrace of feminist poststructural theorising to both challenge and enrich responses to men’s use of domestic violence, each chapter is dedicated to exploring a particular area of tension, unpicking the tangles and knots of complexity that characterise much domestic violence policy and practice. Case studies ground the chapters, providing a focus for thinking through the dilemmas, challenges, and contested nature of ideas, meanings, and practices in this space. Rather than presenting easy answers, each chapter provides a forum for the exploration of ambiguity and complexity – to acknowledge the discomfort and sit with this, not rush to resolve it. Situated within this contested, uncomfortable terrain, this book presents a small – but important – step towards a reimagining of the ways in which we think about and respond to domestic violence. It will be of interest to scholars and students of gender studies, sociology, health, and social care.

Home in British Working-Class Fiction

Home in British Working-Class Fiction PDF Author: Nicola Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317121368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered ’ex-mill girl novelist’ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.

Causes in Common

Causes in Common PDF Author: Daryl Leeworthy
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book tells the compelling and revealing story of the women’s movement in modern Wales. Its panoramic sweep takes the reader on a journey from the nineteenth-century campaigns in support of democracy and the right to vote, and in opposition to slavery, through to the construction of the labour movement in the twentieth century, and on to the more recent demands for sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights. At its core is the argument that the Welsh women’s movement was committed to social democracy, rather than to liberal or conservative alternatives, and that material conditions were the central motivation of those women involved. Drawing on an array of sources, some of which appear in print for the first time, this is a vivid portrait of women who, out of a struggle for equality, individually and collectively, became political activists, grassroots journalists, members of councils and parliaments, and inspirational community leaders.

Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing

Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing PDF Author: Daneen Wardrop
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584657804
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A history of nineteenth-century fashion through the works of Emily Dickinson