Neodomestic American Fiction

<div> <div>In American literature domestic fictions-that is novels focused on the home and homemaking-are linked with white middle-class women's fiction and culture. Employing a spatial lens <i>Neodomestic American Fiction</i> joins and extends other studies in redefining domestic fiction's literary history and definition. Unlike previous redefinitions and reevaluations <i>Neodomestic American Fiction</i> reads domestic novels alongside feminist geography and architectural history to map the links and disjunctions among a range of authors writing during the same period as well as across centuries and cultures. Kristin Jacobson's attention to domestic geographies reveals a new space and subgenre emerge in the 1980s: neodomestic fiction.</div> <div> </div> <div>In this innovative study Kristin Jacobson identifies over thirty novels that renovate traditional forms therefore challenging model domesticity's conservative gender racial and sexual politics. Rather than produce stable single-family homes neodomestic fictions advance a politics of instability characterized by mobility renovation and redesign and relational space. These alternative domesticities-when read in the context of neodomestic fiction-are not <i>marginal</i> but rather <i>central</i> to domesticity's configurations. Such resistance as Iris Marion Young argues is integral to modern political theory and is not an alternative to it.</div> <div> </div> <div>Thus this spatial analysis of post-1980 domestic novels does not indicate a post-feminist or post-gender world. Rather neodomestic fiction's heterogeneous unstable spaces offer opportunities to examine contemporary hierarchies and experiment with more egalitarian homemaking. These fictions include Toni Morrison's <i>Paradise</i> Barbara Kingsolver's <i>The Poisonwood Bible</i> Leslie Marmon Silko's <i>Gardens in the Dunes</i> and Chang-rae Lee's <i>A Gesture Life.</i></div> </div>