Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing

"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 tradition of women's writing that transforms domestic ideologies of 'woman's place' by redefining the ideas about space which underlie that ideology, and deconstructing the binary opposition between public and private spheres. The result is to open the space of gender identity to new relations of class and race. The book demonstrates the continuing hold that domestic ideologies had on modernist women's imaginations, while at the same time showing how these writers anticipated postmodern redefinitions of social space. Specific chapters offer new readings of well-known authors, including Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf, and bring to light relatively forgotten novels by Emily Holmes Coleman and Sylvia Townsend Warner."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.