Single Lives: Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

by Katherine Fama (Editor), Jorie Lagerwey (Editor), Katherine Fama (Contribution by), Jorie Lagerwey (Contribution by), Andreá N. Williams (Contribution by)

Overview

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. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978828513
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2022
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Situating Single Lives Katherine Fama Jorie Lagerwey 1

Part I Singles Studies: Archives and Methods 13

1 Searching for Singles: Archival Approaches for Singleness Studies and Black Women's Collections Andreá N. Williams 15

2 Reclaiming Single Women's Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything Jennifer S. Clark 28

3 Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong Tucker, Illness, and the Single Life Elizabeth DeWolfe 48

Part II Familiar Figures: Representing and Reforming the Single Woman 67

4 Becoming Single: Gidget "Betwixt and Between" Pamela Robertson Wojcik 69

5 F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony": The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen Martina Mastandrea 81

6 Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920-2965 Kristin Celello 102

7 Serves One: Exploring Representations of Female Singleness in American Cookbooks Ursula Kania 118

Part III Singles at Home: Domestic Labors 133

8 Feeling "Like a Queen": Later-Life Single Women at Home in Modern American Short Fiction Katherine Fama 135

9 "Spinsters' Rest"? The Discomforts of Home in British Women's Short Stories of the 1920s to the 1940s Emma Liggins 157

10 All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary Ann Mattis 175

Afterword Benjamin Kahan 193

Acknowledgments 197

Bibliography 199

Notes on Contributors 219

Index 223