Please join us for Laura Biesiadecki's doctoral defense titled  Domestic Materiality Matters: The Homeplace and the Place of Home in American Literature, 1797-1935

Committee: 

- James Salazar (Chair) 
- Sue-Im Lee 
- Talissa Ford 
- Hilary Iris Lowe (Outside Reader) 

Abstract: 

The investment in studies of space, or studies guided by careful observation of space, has been enthusiastically met by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines for the past sixty years. As a path through the field of literary studies, though, the study of space is still relatively untrodden. This dissertation seeks to address a gap in recent scholarship by pursuing a localized evaluation of the house in American Literature, presenting careful consideration of material descriptions in nonfiction and novels to illuminate the relevance of textual domesticity to studies of American expansionist history and to the history of women’s liberation in the United States. Throughout my analysis of fiction and nonfiction texts, I prioritize consideration of material detail — the arrangement and furnishing of rooms, or the experience of moving through them — while connecting that materiality to the experience of comfort or discomfort within the house, addressing both facets of domesticity in the interest of tying examples of localized American living to development of a national American identity in the years after the Civil War. Six decades of moving borders were hugely consequential, not only to the physical land and indigenous inhabitants, but to the national ethos. To best establish relevance of the modest house in the context of this multi-million square acre expansion, I examine fiction and nonfiction by Hannah Webster Foster, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Beecher, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Engaging with American history and fiction under the guiding influence of spatial literary studies, evaluating real and imagined domestic places written by women in a multitude of forms with consistent guidelines, and investing attention in the connection between materiality and occupant experience not only facilitates fresh analysis of familiar titles, but offers a new and exciting way to critically consider gender and domesticity as it developed through more than sixty years of American Westward expansion.

Please contact the Department Coordinator, James O'Brien (james.t.obrien@temple.edu), for the meeting link.