Single Lives

Offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the ‘singly blessed’ women and ‘bachelor girls’ of the 19th and early 20th century and ‘all the single ladies’ of the 21st century.

" Single Lives , focusing on a wide range of British and American texts from the nineteenth to the present century, makes a timely feminist intervention into ongoing critical conversations about the representation of women’s singleness. This engaging interdisciplinary collection, which foregrounds diverse embodiments of singleness, revisits familiar figures, and promotes expanded methods and sources to better understand single women’s lived experiences, promises to greatly enrich the field of singleness studies." - Anthea Taylor (author of Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster)

"Drawing from wide-ranging disciplines and spanning a century of British and American history, Single Lives offers an original and engrossing analysis of how the figure of the single woman stands as an implicit challenge to the norm of the patriarchal nuclear family."

- Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter) " Single Lives , focusing on a wide range of British and American texts from the nineteenth to the present century, makes a timely feminist intervention into ongoing critical conversations about the representation of women’s singleness. This engaging interdisciplinary collection, which foregrounds diverse embodiments of singleness, revisits familiar figures, and promotes expanded methods and sources to better understand single women’s lived experiences, promises to greatly enrich the field of singleness studies." - Anthea Taylor (author of Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster)

"Drawing from wide-ranging disciplines and spanning a century of British and American history, Single Lives offers an original and engrossing analysis of how the figure of the single woman stands as an implicit challenge to the norm of the patriarchal nuclear family."

- Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter)

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 .