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

Published by Rutgers University Press 2022

Single Lives

Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

Edited by: Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey
With contributions by: Katherine Fama , Jorie Lagerwey , Andreá N. Williams , Jennifer S. Clark , Elizabeth DeWolfe , Pamela Robertson Wojcik , Martina Mastandrea , Kristin Celello , Ursula Kania , Emma Liggins and Ann Mattis
Afterword by: Benjamin Kahan

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978828551

Overview
Contents

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.

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."

— Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: situating single lives Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I Singles Studies: archives and methods
Chapter 1 Searching for Singles: archival approaches for singleness studies and black women’s collections Andreá N. Williams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
Chapter 2 Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: gender, melodrama, and the processes of adaptation in the best of everything Jennifer S. Clark Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
Chapter 3 Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong tucker, illness, and the single life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
PART II Familiar Figures: representing and reforming the single woman
Chapter 4 Becoming Single: gidget “betwixt and between” Pamela Robertson Wojcik Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
Chapter 5 F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony” the unmarried flapper in literature and on screen Martina Mastandrea Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
Chapter 6 Neither Betwixt nor Between: divorced mothers in the united states, 1920–1965 Kristin Celello Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
Chapter 7 Serves One: exploring representations of female singleness in American cookbooks Ursula Kania Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	118
PART III Singles at Home domestic labors
Chapter 8 Feeling “Like a Queen” later-life single women at home in modern American short fiction Katherine Fama Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Chapter 9 “Spinsters’ Rest”? the discomforts of home in british women’s short stories of the 1920s to the 1940s Emma Liggins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Chapter 10 All the Single Nannies: reforming elite domesticity and the cultural imaginary Ann Mattis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Afterword Benjamin Kahan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223