Domestic geographies: Neo-domestic American fiction (Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Chang-rae Lee, Don DeLillo)

The term "domestic fiction" traditionally refers to novels written by women whose dramatic action focuses on homemaking. Conventional domestic fiction aims for domestic stability, represented as a privately-owned, single-family dwelling whose occupants espouse heterosexuality and Protestant morality. While the term domestic fiction usually refers to nineteenth-century fiction, I suggest that contemporary American writers continue to write domestic fiction-but frequently in a revised form. Incorporating feminist geography and literary analysis, my interdisciplinary project investigates late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century manifestations of domestic fiction. The dissertation appraises the literary and social consequences for how female and male American writers map the space of the home.; My project asks: What does contemporary American domestic fiction look like? I argue a critical mass of novelists (i.e., Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Change-rae Lee, Don DeLillo) renovate the ideal home's usual definition by posing instability as a central structure of quotidian American homemaking. The collection of novels I call "neo-domestic fiction" destabilizes domestic space and thereby challenges sacred notions about domesticity. Neo-domestic fiction breaks conventional domesticity's model and "recycles"---to borrow Rosemary Marangoly George's terminology---the rubble to trouble and broaden American domesticity's definition.; The novels that fit neo-domestic fiction's definition include narratives where a significant portion of the story takes place in a domestic sphere, that self-consciously construct the home, and that exhibit domestic instability in the form of three neo-domestic tropes: domestic mobility, relational domestic space, and renovation or redesign of the conventional model American home. My project draws from several representative novels to map each of the neo-domestic features. I appraise the neo-domestic structures' significance with the help of feminist geography, which views instability as a key component to addressing America's housing problems.; Three implications emerge from the study of this recycled genre. First, neo-domestic fiction marks a shift in domestic fiction's conventional politics, from stability to instability. Next, moving from a plot-based analysis to a focus on domestic space broadens the genre's time period into the twenty-first century. Finally, the analysis also broadens the genre's scope to include American male writers and domestic fiction focused on domestic masculinity.