| Opening out canonical definitions of political fiction to include community, family, and social relationships, this study focuses on women's writing, showing how generically opposed modes such as realism and romance often work together. I use texts from the 19th century through 1993 to analyze my major considerations: politics versus the romance, the indeterminacy of literary representation in political fiction, and the ways in which personal and interrelational politics reconfigure traditional ideas of politics.; Paralleling genre theories of political fiction to marxist theories of labor, I conceive the idea of "use value politics." Analogous to focusing on domestic labor and reproductive labor, this feminist vision of politics asks us to acknowledge the invisible, daily, local politics of home, community, and relationship, politics that have no direct, "profit-making" ability or electoral payoff.; The dissertation traces a tradition of women's political fiction from the 19th century romance, through the proletarian novel of the 1930s, to contemporary renderings of political issues such as national borders, anti-war activism, racism, and feminism. In addition to providing close readings of texts, this study also examines clusters of texts and trends, such as the contemporary prefaces to 1930s novels written by women, gendered reconfigurations of electoral politics, and the use of the short story as a political form.; Contemporary authors I study include: Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver, Meridel LeSueur, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Helena Maria Viramontes, Alice Walker, and Hisaye Yamamoto. The dissertation seeks to scrutinize the opposition drawn between politics and aesthetics, an opposition which underlies most contemporary reviews of political fiction. |
