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Author Sterry, Emma, author

Title The single woman, modernity, and literary culture : women's fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s / Emma Sterry
Published Cham : Springer, 2017

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Description 1 online resource
Contents The Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture; Acknowledgments; Contents; 1 The Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture: An Introduction; The Single Woman; Modernity, Modernism, and the Middlebrow; Women's Writing and Literary Culture from the 1920s to the 1940s; Structure of the Study; Notes; 2 The Single Woman in Context: Modernity, Femininity, Sexuality; Women's Changing Lives in Modernity; The Impact of Modernity on Cultural Narratives About Femininity and Sexuality; The Typical Guises of the Modern Single Woman; The Less Obvious Guises of the Single Woman; Notes
3 The Single Woman, the City, and the CountryThe Evolving City and Country in Modernity; Landscape and Literary Culture; Exploring Urban and Rural Landscapes: Locating the Single Woman in Women's Fiction of the 1920s to the 1940s; Notes; 4 The Single Woman, Bohemianism, and Domesticity; Rethinking Bohemianism and Domesticity in Modernity; Bohemianism, Domesticity, and Literary Culture; Negotiating Domestic Scripts and Bohemian Sensibilities in Women's Fiction of the 1920s to the 1940s; Notes; 5 The Single Woman, and the Public and the Private; The Public and the Private in Modernity
The Public and the Private in Literary CultureNavigating Public and Private Worlds: The Single Woman's Search for Subjectivity; Notes; 6 Afterword: Legacies; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Summary This book situates the single woman within the evolving landscape of modernity, examining how she negotiated rural and urban worlds, explored domestic and bohemian roles, and traversed public and private spheres. In the modern era, the single woman was both celebrated and derided for refusing to conform to societal expectations regarding femininity and sexuality. The different versions of single women presented in cultural narratives of this period--including the old maid, odd woman, New Woman, spinster, and flapper--were all sexually suspicious. The single woman, however, was really an amorphous figure who defied straightforward categorization. Emma Sterry explores depictions of such single women in transatlantic women's fiction of the 1920s to 1940s. Including a diverse selection of renowned and forgotten writers, such as Djuna Barnes, Rosamond Lehmann, Ngaio Marsh, and Eliot Bliss, this book argues that the single woman embodies the tensions between tradition and progress in both middlebrow and modernist literary culture
Notes Print version record
Subject Single women in literature.
English literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism
American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism
English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
American literature
American literature -- Women authors
English literature
English literature -- Women authors
Single women in literature
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9783319408293
3319408291