Read complete books and articles on: Domestic Literature

At Questia, we offer:

Exclusive access to more than 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles.
Trusted resources from leading publishers.
Time saving tools to do better, faster research!

14 of the Best Books and Articles on: Domestic Literature

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel » Read Now
by Nancy Armstrong. 310 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic...
Read More

Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. She also examines the works of such novelists as Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontes to reveal the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.
Show less
2.

The Home Plot: Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual » Read Now
by Ann Romines. 320 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

Reconstructing the Family in Contemporary American Fiction » Read Now
by Desmond F. McCarthy. 168 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States » Read Now
by Lora Romero. 150 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...purely oppositional literature could arise. Chapter...tendentious use of domestic womanhood in order...simply rewritings of domestic ideology in which...refers to "American...
5.

Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction » Read Now
by Susan Johnston. 182 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

Dissenting Women in Dickens' Novels: The Subversion of Domestic Ideology » Read Now
by Brenda Ayres. 190 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families...
Read More

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. The woman was supposed to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed by the advice books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to "proper" behavior. In an age when fiction was seen as a vehicle for propagating moral and behavioral norms, the Victorian novels frequently presented the woman as the angel in the home. On the surface, Dickens' novels certainly advance the view that women should be subordinate to men. But on closer look, Dickens' works also challenge the Victorian conceptions of how women should behave. This book provides an illuminating analysis of how the Dickens text modifies and subverts conventional Victorian ideology through a convoluted characterization of women that fails to promote domesticity.
Show less
7.

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century » Read Now
by Claudia Tate. 302 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like...
Read More

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.
Show less
8.

Black Family (Dys)Function in Novels by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen & Fannie Hurst » Read Now
by Licia Morrow Calloway. 174 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
9.

Labor & Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America Gender and American Figure » Read Now
by Paula Rabinowitz. 224 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...claims of history on the literature of the 1930s re-formed...world-historical events and domestic intimacies indicate...theories about women, literature, and politics in...
10.

The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel » Read Now
by Jeff Nunokawa. 152 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In "The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's "Little Dorrit and "Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda...
Read More

In "The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's "Little Dorrit and "Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda and "Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel.
If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergencesof fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the
Show less
11.

Domesticity, Imperialism and Emigration in the Victorian Novel » Read Now
by Diana C. Archibald. 214 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

During the nineteenth century, as hundreds of thousands of British citizens left England for the New Worlds, hearth and home were physically moved from the heart of the empire to its very outskirts. In Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel, Diana Archibald explores how such...
Read More

During the nineteenth century, as hundreds of thousands of British citizens left England for the New Worlds, hearth and home were physically moved from the heart of the empire to its very outskirts. In Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel, Diana Archibald explores how such demographic shifts affected the ways in which Victorians both promoted and undermined the ideal of the domestic woman. Drawing upon works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, and William Makepeace Thackeray, the author shows how the ideals of womanhood and home promoted by domestic ideology in many ways conflict with the argument in favor of emigration to imperial destinations.
A rather predictable pattern emerges in almost every Victorian novel that encounters the New Worlds: if an English hero is destined for a happy ending, he either marries an English angel-wife and brings her with him to the New World or, more often, abandons thoughts of settling abroad and returns to England to marry and establish a home. This pattern seems to support the supposedly complementary ideologies of domesticity and imperialism.
The literary texts, however, reveal much ambivalence toward this domestic ideal. Female emigrants were desperately needed in the colonies; thus, a woman's imperial duty was to leave England. Yet her womanly duty told her to remain an untainted idol beside an English hearthside. The domestic ideal, then, seems to have been more in conflict with imperialistic ideology than heretofore supposed.
Show less
12.

To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance » Read Now
by G. M. Goshgarian. 237 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
13.

Fiction of the Home Place: Jewett, Cather, Glasgow, Porter, Welty, and Naylor » Read Now
by Helen Fiddyment Levy. 268 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
14.

Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott » Read Now
by Charles Strickland. 198 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library