Single Lives Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

EDITED BY KATHERINE FAMA AND JORIE LAGERWEY

“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 gures, and promotes expanded methods and sources to better understand single women’s lived experiences, promises to greatly enrich the eld 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 gure 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

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. 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 eld, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, lm, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging elds of social history, women’s studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar gures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered lm histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist lm and media scholars, and literary historians, and re ects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force.

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 of Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom

Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

234 pp 12 b/w images, 7 tables 6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2851-3 paper $36.95S

978-1-9788-2852-0 cloth $130.00SU

May 2022

Cultural Studies • Women’s Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction: Situating Single Lives by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey

Part I: Singles Studies: Archives and Methods

Chapter 1: Searching for Singles: Archival Approaches for Singleness Studies and Black Women’s Collections by Andreá N. Williams

Chapter 2: Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything by Jennifer S. Clark

Chapter 3: Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong Tucker, Illness, and the Single Life by Elizabeth DeWolfe

Part II: Familiar Figures: Representing and Reforming the Single Woman

Chapter 4: Becoming Single: Gidget “Betwixt and Between” by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Chapter 5: F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony:” The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen by Martina Mastandrea

Chapter 6: Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920-1965 by Kristin Celello

Chapter 7: Serves One: Exploring Representations of Female Singleness in American Cookbooks by Ursula Kania

Part III: Singles at Home: Domestic Labors

Chapter 8: Feeling “Like a Queen:” Later-Life Single Women at Home in Modern American Short Fiction by Katherine Fama

Chapter 9: “Spinsters’ Rest?”: The Discomforts of Home in British Women’s Short Stories of the 1920s to the 1940s by Emma Liggins

Chapter 10: All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary by Ann Mattis

Afterword by Benjamin Kahan

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography Index

208 pp 35 color images 6 x 9

978-1-9788-2163-7 paper $27.95S

978-1-9788-2164-4 cloth $69.95SU

August 2022

Latinx Studies • Popular Culture • Media Studies