Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory Representing National Time [Paperback]

This book argues that popular feminist fiction provided a key means by which American culture narrated and negotiated the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s. It explores the intersection of two key features of late twentieth-century American culture.The Problem of Static Time: Totalization, the End of History and the End of the 1960s Heir Apparent: Legacies of the 1960s in The Women's Room and Vida Dead-End Job: The Stepford Wives, Domestic Labor and the End of History Promiscuous Times: Post-Structuralist Desires in Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying Alice Walker's Hindsight and the Price of Futurity My Mother, Myself: Sentiment and the Transcendence of Time in The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood Coda: Hurried Woman Tales

By charting the modes of temporality structuring post-1960s women's popular fiction, Elliott offers an illuminating way of articulating the narratives of second-wave feminism to evolving conceptions of capitalist America. Her argument that these narratives are, first and foremost, national allegories gives them a refreshing intelligibility and historical agency. It's the kind of argument with which, whether or not they agree with her, future generations of scholars will need to reckon. - Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University and author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

In this impressive debut, Jane Elliott revisits a fascinating passage in recent American culture, when feminism could advance through popular fiction and critical theory alike. She examines a series of novels both famous and forgotten, unfolding their allegorical layers to show how they speak directly to the changing contours of domination and liberation in women s lives. The book offers timely lessons, not only about the renewable resources of popular cultural forms, but also about the value of allegorical reading for contemporary critical practiclÃY