Sanctum sanctorum: The alternative designs and domesticities of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton.
Item
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Title
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Sanctum sanctorum: The alternative designs and domesticities of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton.
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Identifier
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AAI3298141
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identifier
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3298141
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Creator
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Hellman, Caroline.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marc Dolan
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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In Sanctum Sanctorum: The Alternative Designs and Domesticities of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton, I explore the ways in which four major American women writers from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century inhabit actual domestic space and the ways in which they portray domestic space in their work. My work questions the tendency to characterize mid to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century constructions of domesticity as suppressive and consequently in need of subversion. I propose that Alcott, Stowe, Cather, and Wharton surmount the division of domestic life and public life that occurred during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While their home lives are seemingly private and individual, the spaces they design for themselves and in their texts make public, political, and communal their unique forms of domesticity. This transformation, in turn, enables sovereignty over a domain larger than their respective domestic spheres and demonstrates that each author's sanctum sanctorum, or inviolably holy place, is not contained or interior, but is in fact located in a larger, social construction of domestic reform.;Syncretising domestic literature with domestic practice, I appraise what happens to the domestic and the private when placed in public, seemingly foreign contexts---economy, health, and social welfare for Stowe, material feminism for Alcott, the transient landscape for Cather, and World War I for Wharton. This interdisciplinary inquiry undertakes a dual treatment of domesticity in an effort to synthesize a more complete understanding of the relationships between social history and literary accomplishment and proposes that private, domestic space is a rich, generative site for political and social change.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.