Single Lives

KATHERINE FAMA is an assistant professor of American literature in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin in Ireland. JORIE LAGERWEY is an associate professor in television studies at University College Dublin in Ireland. She is the author, with Taylor Nygaard, of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness and Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom.  

Introduction: Situating Single Lives by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey
Part I: Singles Studies: Archives and Methods
Chapter 1: Searching for Singles: Archival Approaches for Singleness Studies and Black Women’s Collections by Andreá N. Williams
Chapter 2: Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything by Jennifer S. Clark  
Chapter 3: Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong Tucker, Illness, and the Single Life by Elizabeth DeWolfe
Part II: Familiar Figures: Representing and Reforming the Single Woman
Chapter 4: Becoming Single: Gidget “Betwixt and Between” by Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Chapter 5: F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony:” The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen by Martina Mastandrea
Chapter 6: Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920-1965 by Kristin Celello
Chapter 7: Serves One: Exploring Representations of Female Singleness in American Cookbooks by Ursula Kania
Part III: Singles at Home: Domestic Labors
Chapter 8: Feeling “Like a Queen:” Later-Life Single Women at Home in Modern American Short Fiction by Katherine Fama
Chapter 9: “Spinsters’ Rest?”: The Discomforts of Home in British Women’s Short Stories of the 1920s to the 1940s by Emma Liggins
Chapter 10: All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary by Ann Mattis
Afterword by Benjamin Kahan
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index