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Single Lives
Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film
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Edited by:
Katherine Fama
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With contributions by:
Katherine Fama
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Afterword by:
Benjamin Kahan
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2022
About this book
Single Lives is a collection of singleness studies essays from the interdisciplinary humanities that explores the last two hundred years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in the US and the UK. Independent women have always been a center around which social anxieties and excitement coalesced. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between celibacy and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus, as she has been from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This collection offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the "singly blessed" women and "bachelor girls" of the 19th and early 20th century and "all the single ladies" of the 21st century. Essays read singleness across genre and field, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, film, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging fields of social history, women's studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar figures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered film histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist film and media scholars, and literary historians, and reflects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force.
Author / Editor information
KATHERINE FAMA is an assistant professor of American literature in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin in Ireland.
JORIE LAGERWEY is an associate professor in television studies at University College Dublin in Ireland. She is the author, with Taylor Nygaard, of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness and Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom.
JORIE LAGERWEY is an associate professor in television studies at University College Dublin in Ireland. She is the author, with Taylor Nygaard, of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness and Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom.
Reviews
"Single Lives, focusing on a wide range of British and American texts from the nineteenth to the present century, makes a timely feminist intervention into ongoing critical conversations about the representation of women’s singleness. This engaging interdisciplinary collection, which foregrounds diverse embodiments of singleness, revisits familiar figures, and promotes expanded methods and sources to better understand single women’s lived experiences, promises to greatly enrich the field of singleness studies."
— Anthea Taylor, author of Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster"Drawing from wide-ranging disciplines and spanning a century of British and American history, Single Lives offers an original and engrossing analysis of how the figure of the single woman stands as an implicit challenge to the norm of the patriarchal nuclear family."
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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Introduction: situating single lives
1 - PART I Singles Studies: archives and methods
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Chapter 1 Searching for Singles: archival approaches for singleness studies and black women’s collections
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Chapter 2 Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: gender, melodrama, and the processes of adaptation in the best of everything
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Chapter 3 Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong tucker, illness, and the single life
48 - PART II Familiar Figures: representing and reforming the single woman
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Chapter 4 Becoming Single: gidget “betwixt and between”
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Chapter 5 F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony” the unmarried flapper in literature and on screen
81 -
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Chapter 6 Neither Betwixt nor Between: divorced mothers in the united states, 1920–1965
102 -
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Chapter 7 Serves One: exploring representations of female singleness in American cookbooks
118 - PART III Singles at Home domestic labors
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Chapter 8 Feeling “Like a Queen” later-life single women at home in modern American short fiction
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Chapter 9 “Spinsters’ Rest”? the discomforts of home in british women’s short stories of the 1920s to the 1940s
157 -
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Chapter 10 All the Single Nannies: reforming elite domesticity and the cultural imaginary
175 -
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Afterword
193 -
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Acknowledgments
197 -
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Bibliography
199 -
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Notes on Contributors
219 -
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Index
223
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 11, 2022
eBook ISBN:
9781978828551
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781978828551
Keywords for this book
singleness studies; interdisciplinary humanities; literature; literary studies; media studies; popular media; single women; the US; the UK; Independent women; social anxieties; family home; domestic independence; household; housework; labor; celibacy; sexual relations; sexuality; cultural studies; singly blessed; bachelor girls; all the single ladies; social history; women's studies; queer theory; Black feminism; cook books; ephemera; film histories; domestic; gender and sexuality; feminist film; media scholars; literary history; cultural force; economic force; political force; Melodrama; Jane Armstrong Tucker; Betwixt and Between; Scott Fitzgerald; The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony; Unmarried; Divorced Mothers; Short Fiction; Spinsters; Spinsters’ Rest?; British Women’; Short Stories; Nannies; Domesticity; Cultural Imaginary; Film; Communications; Gender Studies; Sociology
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
