Book contents
- The New Feminist Literary Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Feminist Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction
- I Frontiers
- II Fields
- III Forms
- Chapter 11 Feminist Dwellings: Imagining the Domestic in the Twenty-first-century Literary Novel
- Chapter 12 Who Rules the World? Reimagining the Contemporary Feminist Dystopia
- Chapter 13 Transnational Feminism and the Young Adult Novel
- Chapter 14 Feminist Manuals and Manifestos in the Twenty-first Century
- Chapter 15 ‘This is not a memoir’: Feminist Writings from Life
- Chapter 16 Feminist Poetries of the Open Wound
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 11 - Feminist Dwellings: Imagining the Domestic in the Twenty-first-century Literary Novel
from III - Forms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2020
- The New Feminist Literary Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Feminist Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction
- I Frontiers
- II Fields
- III Forms
- Chapter 11 Feminist Dwellings: Imagining the Domestic in the Twenty-first-century Literary Novel
- Chapter 12 Who Rules the World? Reimagining the Contemporary Feminist Dystopia
- Chapter 13 Transnational Feminism and the Young Adult Novel
- Chapter 14 Feminist Manuals and Manifestos in the Twenty-first Century
- Chapter 15 ‘This is not a memoir’: Feminist Writings from Life
- Chapter 16 Feminist Poetries of the Open Wound
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Critical responses to the home frequently imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist writing suggest that the domestic is too compromised for a twenty-first-century feminist imaginary. Contemporary feminist dialogues are increasingly alert to the politics of the domestic and its resistance to transformational politics. Yet feminist writing has not relinquished the domestic as a site or language for imagining feminist possibility and practice. If anything, we have seen a proliferation of feminist writing interested in the domestic since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This chapter turns to three literary novels spanning the century so far: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005),Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011), and Miranda July’s First Bad Man(2015). In each novel, the homeas literary institution, holiday villa, and single-woman’s houseoffers a focal point for questions about feminist imagining that gives shape to specific textual strategies, suggesting that if twenty-first-century feminism cannot relinquish the domestic, we must learn to dwell in its compromised politics.
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- The New Feminist Literary Studies , pp. 157 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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