| Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins Subjects: American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Women and literature; Domestic relations in literature; American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; English liter; Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity , Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Susan Fraiman is professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her Columbia University Press publications include Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003) and Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1994). |