Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T15:53:13.767Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Jennifer Cooke
Affiliation:
Loughborough University
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×