Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-251) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: "As with a startling picture" : modernism and the domestic sphere -- "For she asks forever only help" : the critique of maternalist reform discourse in Djuna Barnes's Ryder -- Tortured bodies and twisted words : the antidomestic vision of Jean Toomer's Cane -- Freaked : eastern European immigration and the "American home" in Edna Ferber's American beauty -- "Not sentimental" : the double bind of white working-class femininity in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio -- Siren calls : consumer revolution and the body beautiful in Nathanael West's The day of the locust -- "Not charity yet!" : state-supported capitalism and the secret life of god in Flannery O'Connor's Wise blood.
Summary:
"Susan Edmunds returns to the Progressive Era, when maternalist reformers linked early welfare initiatives to a discourse of social housekeeping that extended domestic roles into civil life. Highlighting the unique importance of a modern sentimental project of domestic reform to the formation of the U.S. welfare state, Edmunds demonstrates how modernist writers shaped--and misshaped--their domestic fiction in response to new state and market investments in the home. Crucial to Edmunds's study is the formation, during this era, of the 'domestic exterior, ' a hybrid social space located at the intersection of home, market, and state and invested with the mandate to support and regulate domestic life. Edmunds demonstrates how U.S. modernists used an aesthetic of defamiliarization and grotesque distortion to map the fraught ground of the domestic exterior, and to align the unsettled space of modern domesticity with the revolutionary discourses of socialism, consumerism, and the avant-garde. The book reveals how modernists' focus on issues ranging from domestic abuse, lynching, and eugenics to educational reform, health care, and social security delineates successive points of struggle in a history of welfare state building that culminates with the New Deal and the GI Bill. Combining historical and political perspective with the social theory of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Donzelot, and Pierre Bourdieu, the book ultimately proposes that modernists forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the widespread ambivalence, alienation, and conflict that characterize our current attachments to family life"--Publisher's description.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.