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An acute housing shortage was one of the defining features of Soviet life. This book explores the housing problem throughout the 70 years of Soviet history, looking at changing political ideology on appropriate forms of housing under socialism, successive government policies on housing and the meaning and experience of ‘home’ for Soviet citizens. The book's main concern is housing as a gendered issue. To this end, it examines the use of housing to alter gender relations, and the ways in which domestic space was differentially experienced by men and women. The book places the research firmly in the context of existing literature. While this includes a number of short works that consider the gendered implications of housing policy in specific periods, the book provides an analysis of housing as a gendered issue throughout Soviet history, comparing and contrasting housing policy and the experience of home life under different leaders. Much of the material comes from Soviet magazines and journals, which enables the book to demonstrate how official ideas on housing and daily life changed during the course of the Soviet era, and were propagandised to the population. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the book also draws on the memories of people with direct experience of Soviet housing and domestic life.
The article seeks to explore questions of fictional female victimhood by examining feminist and post-feminist critical engagements with the Gothic heroine figure. The paper traces instances of this figure in literary and filmic versions of the ‘female gothic’ narrative, focusing in particular on the female gothic film cycle of the 1940s, in films such as Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), and the cycles recurrence in more contemporary female-addressed suspense thrillers, such as Deceived (1991), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Shadow of Doubt (1998), and What Lies Beneath (2000). The paper reveals that the neo-gothic heroine condenses key issues pertinent to shifts in feminist and post-feminist critique, such as woman-as-victim, negotiations about the meanings of femininity, and the relationship between women and domestic space.
This article traces how the queer Black writer James Baldwin’s transnational palate and experiences influenced the ways he wrote about Black domestic spaces in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, while Black feminist cooks and writers like Edna Lewis, Jessica B. Harris, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor developed new theories of soul food in relation to the Black American community and broader American cuisine, Baldwin incorporated these philosophies and transnational tastes into his lifestyle and works. He traveled and worked around Europe, settling in places like Paris, Istanbul, and Saint-Paul de Vence for years at a time. In Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent his last years, he set up his own welcome table, at which he hosted internationally renowned guests and shared his love of cuisine. Inevitably, Baldwin’s passion for cooking and hosting meals became a large, though scholarly neglected, component of his novels and essays. In his novels Another Country, which he finished in Istanbul and published in 1962, and Just Above My Head, which he finished in Saint-Paul de Vence and published in 1979, Baldwin’s depictions of food and Black kitchens take a queer turn. Instead of lingering on traditional Black family structures, these texts specifically present new formulations of intimate home life and reimagine relationships between food, kitchens, race, and sex in the late twentieth century.
Women of Letters writes a new history of English women’s intellectual worlds using their private letters as evidence of hidden networks of creative exchange. This is the first detailed study to situate correspondence as the central social practice in the development of female intellectual thought in the period c.1650-1750. The main argument of the book is that many women of this period engaged with a life of the mind through reading and writing letters. Until now, it has been assumed that women’s intellectual opportunities were curtailed by their confinement in the home. Women of Letters illuminates the household as a vibrant site of intellectual thought and expression. By using an original definition of ‘intellectual’, the book offers a new and inclusive view of intellectual life: one that embraces a broad range of informal writing and critical discourse and abandons the elitism of traditional definitions of scholarly achievement. Amidst the catalogue of day-to-day news in women’s letters, are lines of ink dedicated to the discussion of books, plays and ideas. Through these personal epistles, Women of Letters offers a fresh interpretation of intellectual life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one that champions the ephemeral and the fleeting in order to rediscover women’s lives and minds.
The female Gothic continuum The following chapter brings together many of the central concerns of this book, particularly the question of the Gothic drama’s awareness of its domestic viewing context and domestic viewer, and the centrality of domestic space within the image repertoire of Gothic television. It does this in relation to the female Gothic television adaptation
In conclusion, Gothic television can be characterised by the meeting of two houses: the textual domestic spaces of Gothic television (haunted houses, decaying mansions, permeable family homes under threat from within and without) and the extra-textual domestic spaces of the medium (the homes in which Gothic television is viewed). This book has examined the dialogue between these
Britain even after the First World War. The efforts to restore ‘normality’ after the disruptions of war led to a reassertion of the femininity of domestic space and its centrality to family life. As Alison Light has pointed out, this pervasive reaction against postwar modernity evidenced a conservatism shared by many British men and women. 2 Thus, it was not until the post
end, seeking to kill the heroine. (1990: 18) This definition, therefore, builds on the key narrative elements described above by Miles in relation to the female Gothic novel, by expanding upon key visual characteristics, such as subjective narration (point of view) and the importance of location to the female Gothic narrative (in the form of the ancestral mansion). The question of subjective narration and point of view will be addressed more fully below: however, it is the significance of the domestic space in these narratives which must remain at the
. In part at least, this has necessitated an argument about theatrical absence. The opening chapters have reconstructed the extra-theatrical significance of domestic spaces and the meanings of their contents. Part of the point of this exercise has been specific to domestic tragedies. Didactic drama necessarily presents things as they should not be, and domestic tragedy by and large stages the denial, undermining and downright disregard of the generally accepted significances of the household. Throughout these plays, the progression of property and family values
her body. Such behaviour was, for William Whately, a route to the location of whoredom: ‘This impudency and unwomanhood doth track the way to the harlot’s house.’ 33 In this complex image the moral weight of ‘impudence’ – action which denies proper power relations – is such that it moves a woman ‘outside’ and on her way to the antithesis of domestic space. Her behaviour has the power to unmake the physical confines of the domestic, and the choice to perform good or bad actions constructs space as either house or whorehouse. Whateley’s ‘unhuswifelines’ and