Neodomestic American Fiction
Neodomestic American Fiction

Author: Kristin J. Jacobson

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780814256466

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In American literature, domestic fictions--that is, novels focused on the home and homemaking--are linked with white, middle-class women's fiction and culture. Employing a spatial lens, Neodomestic American Fiction joins and extends other studies in redefining domestic fiction's literary history and definition. Unlike previous redefinitions and reevaluations, Neodomestic American Fiction reads domestic novels alongside feminist geography and architectural history to map the links and disjunctions among a range of authors writing during the same period as well as across centuries and cultures. Kristin Jacobson's attention to domestic geographies reveals a new space and subgenre emerge in the 1980s: neodomestic fiction. In this innovative study, Kristin Jacobson identifies over thirty novels that renovate traditional forms, therefore challenging model domesticity's conservative gender, racial, and sexual politics. Rather than produce stable single-family homes, neodomestic fictions advance a politics of instability characterized by mobility, renovation and redesign, and relational space. These "alternative" domesticities--when read in the context of neodomestic fiction--are not marginal but rather central to domesticity's configurations. Such resistance, as Iris Marion Young argues, "is integral to modern political theory and is not an alternative to it." Thus, this spatial analysis of post-1980 domestic novels does not indicate a post-feminist or post-gender world. Rather, neodomestic fiction's heterogeneous, unstable spaces offer opportunities to examine contemporary hierarchies and experiment with more egalitarian homemaking. These fictions include Toni Morrison's Paradise, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes, and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life.

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes
The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes

Author: Patrick O'Donnell

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 1607

ISBN-13: 1119431719

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Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

The American Adrenaline Narrative
The American Adrenaline Narrative

Author: Kristin J. Jacobson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0820356999

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1. DESIRING NATURES -- 2. CONQUERING NATURES -- 3. SPIRITUAL NATURES -- 4. EROTIC NATURES -- 5. RISKY NATURES -- 6. RESTORATIVE NATURES -- Appendix : List of Contemporary American Adrenaline Narratives.

Sibling Romance in American Fiction, 1835-1900
Sibling Romance in American Fiction, 1835-1900

Author: E. VanDette

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-02-06

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 113731690X

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This study posits that the narrative of sibling love as a culturally significant tradition in nineteenth-century American fiction. Ultimately, Emily E. VanDette suggests that these novels contribute to historical conversations about affiliation in such tumultuous contexts as sectional divisions, slavery debates, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism
Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism

Author: Jennifer A. Williamson

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2013-12-15

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0813562996

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Today’s critical establishment assumes that sentimentalism is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode that all but disappeared by the twentieth century. In this book, Jennifer Williamson argues that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, she explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals. Williamson covers new ground by examining authors who are not generally read for their sentimental narrative practices, considering the proletarian novels of Grace Lumpkin, Josephine Johnson, and John Steinbeck alongside neo-slave narratives written by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. Through careful close readings, Williamson argues that the appropriation of sentimental modes enables both sympathetic thought and systemic action in the proletarian and neo-slave novels under discussion. She contrasts appropriations that facilitate such cultural work with those that do not, including Kathryn Stockett’s novel and film The Help. The book outlines how sentimentalism remains a viable and important means of promoting social justice while simultaneously recognizing and exploring how sentimentality can further white privilege. Sentimentalism is not only alive in the twentieth century. It is a flourishing rhetorical practice among a range of twentieth-century authors who use sentimental tactics in order to appeal to their readers about a range of social justice issues. This book demonstrates that at stake in their appeals is who is inside and outside of the American family and nation.

Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature
Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature

Author: Kristin J. Jacobson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 3319738518

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This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

War in the Neighborhood
War in the Neighborhood

Author: Seth Tobocman

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780994050724

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New York City's Lower East Side was a well-known landing strip for recent arrivals in the United States. For more than a century it was home to thriving communities of artists, radicals and working class families. In a gripping series of fictionalized accounts, political artist Seth Tobocman illustrates the L.E.S. of the late 80s an era of homelessness and gentrification, ACT UP and the AIDS epidemic, tent cities and squatted apartment buildings, street brawls between punks and skinheads and, above all, an emerging gulf between rich and poor. "

Representing the Contemporary North American Family
Representing the Contemporary North American Family

Author: Sophie Chapuis

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1527573435

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The rise in individualism and the growing liberalism of family law may be seen as potential threats to the family as a unit. Currently, defenders of traditional family models are being forced to accept a more fluid definition of family as an intrinsic heterogeneous unit. Central to this book is the idea that the family, as a social unit around which society is structured, still plays a pivotal role in North America. States, courts, and political parties have had to address the major mutations of the family landscape in the last decades. The family is instrumental in reorganizing communities in migration contexts, and is a key component of political strategies. The way family is staged in the press, on social media, and in TV shows, reflects the fast-changing patterns and new realities of North American families, and offers alternatives to hegemonic representations of normative families. It also ranks high among current literary obsessions since it is the privileged receptacle for contemporary anxieties and operates both as an ideal retreat or an alienating space. The proliferation of family narratives, in their ever-shifting forms, reveals that family has boundless potential for fiction, and continues to run deep in the North American imaginary. This book gathers together approaches that range from field study, sociology, politics, media studies and literature. The contributions here show the centrality of the family both as an individual unit and as social, political, legal, and fictional constructs.

American Unexceptionalism
American Unexceptionalism

Author: Kathy Knapp

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 160938251X

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American Unexceptionalism examines a constellation of post-9/11 novels that revolve around white middle-class male suburbanites, thus following a tradition established by writers such as John Updike and John Cheever. Focusing closely on recent works by Richard Ford, Chang-Rae Lee, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, Anne Tyler, Gish Jen, A. M. Homes, and others, Kathy Knapp demonstrates that these authors revisit this well-trod turf and revive the familiar everyman character in order to reconsider and reshape American middle-class experience in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and their ongoing aftermath. The novels in question all take place in the sprawling terrain that stretches out beyond the Twin Towers—the postwar suburbs that since the end of World War II have served, like the Twin Towers themselves, as a powerful advertisement of dominance to people around the globe, by projecting an image of prosperity and family values. These suburban tales and their everyman protagonists grapple, however indirectly, with the implications of the apparent decline of the economic, geopolitical, and moral authority of the United States. In the context of perceived decay and diminishing influence, these novels actively counteract the narrative of American exceptionalism frequently peddled in the wake of 9/11. If suburban fiction has historically been faulted for its limited vision, this newest iteration has developed a depth of field that self-consciously folds the personal into the political, encompasses the have-nots along with the haves, and takes in the past when it imagines the future, all in order to forge a community of readers who are now accountable to the larger world. American Unexceptionalism traces the trajectory by which recent suburban fiction overturns the values of individualism, private property ownership, and competition that originally provided its foundation. In doing so, the novels examined here offer readers new and flexible ways to imagine being and belonging in a setting no longer characterized by stasis, but by flux.