At Home in the World
Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
A bold new literary history that says women's writing is defined less by domestic concerns than by an engagement with public life
In a bold and sweeping reevaluation of the past two centuries of women's writing, At Home in the World argues that this body of work has been defined less by domestic concerns than by an active engagement with the most pressing issues of public life: from class and religious divisions, slavery, warfare, and labor unrest to democracy, tyranny, globalism, and the clash of cultures. In this new literary history, Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord contend that even the most seemingly traditional works by British, American, and other English-language women writers redefine the domestic sphere in ways that incorporate the concerns of public life, allowing characters and authors alike to forge new, emancipatory narratives.
The book explores works by a wide range of writers, including canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Toni Morrison; neglected or marginalized writers like Mary Antin, Tess Slesinger, and Martha Gellhorn; and recent and contemporary figures, including Nadine Gordimer, Anita Desai, Edwidge Danticat, and Jhumpa Lahiri. DiBattista and Nord show how these writers dramatize tensions between home and the wider world through recurrent themes of sailing forth, escape, exploration, dissent, and emigration. Throughout, the book uncovers the undervalued public concerns of women writers who ventured into ever-wider geographical, cultural, and political territories, forging new definitions of what it means to create a home in the world.
The result is an enlightening reinterpretation of women's writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Princeton professors Nord (Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807 1930) and DiBattista (Imagining Virginia Woolf) devote their first joint work to critiquing the idea that women s writing has historically focused on marriage and general domesticity while remaining ignorant of or uncompelled by the great political and social events of their day. The authors elucidate how women writers, from the 19th century to the present, have redefined patriarchal conceptions of home and responded to public-sphere concerns including world war, political consciousness, and the colonization of the American West. It s hardly a new argument, but Nord and DiBattista make it convincing, compelling, and perhaps most importantly concise. Spending just few pages at a time on each novel, Nord and DiBattista s readings are close but not confining, and compact enough to illuminate the overall narrative without dragging it down. Readers acquainted with the writers discussed, who range chronologically from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront to Nadine Gordimer and Marilynne Robinson, will eagerly await their favorite books four pages of fame. The book s style makes it accessible to less seasoned readers expanding their literary knowledge.
