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العنوان
American Domesticity in selected Novels by
Richard Yates and Maureen Howard /
المؤلف
Ali, Heba Waddah El-Sayed.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / هبة وضاح السيد علي
مشرف / ماجدة حسب النبي
مشرف / إبراهيم محمد مغربي
مناقش / رانية رضا نصر
تاريخ النشر
2021.
عدد الصفحات
150 P. :
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
الدكتوراه
التخصص
الأدب والنظرية الأدبية
تاريخ الإجازة
1/1/2021
مكان الإجازة
جامعة عين شمس - كلية البنات - اللغة الانجليزية
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

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Abstract

Research on the family fiction by both Richard Yates (1926 – 1992) and Maureen Howard (1930 - ) is scarce. Thus, this PhD dissertation has examined their domestic novels giving special attention to themes of love, duty, women’s work, marriage, abortion, divorce, loneliness, and alienation. Further, it has identified and explained narrative techniques used in the selected novels – e.g. stream of consciousness, fragmentation, flashbacks and the novel within a novel. In addition, it has highlighted the common features of the authors’ family fiction and traced the difference in treatment of domesticity in post-WWII America.
The dissertation has been divided into an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction, the history of American domesticity in both fields of sociology and fiction has been discussed. The selected novels by the two authors have been tackled throughout the three chapters comparing and contrasting their perspectives and styles. In Chapter one, entitled Married Life on the Brink, Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) and Howard’s Expensive Habits (1986) have been analyzed: both novels prove their authors to be the best spokespeople for the American couples who struggle in their conflict between pleasing people and satisfying their own whims. In Yates’s novel, Frank and April Wheeler – who seem perfect to others – are having a troubled married life. Similarly, the writer Margaret Flood, in Howard’s novel, oscillates between her duty as a wife and a mother and her passion as an author.
Chapter two, entitled Single Women Searching for an Outlet, has been dedicated to the analysis of Howard’s Bridgeport Bus (1965) and Yates’s The Easter Parade (1976). In both novels, American young ladies have been meticulously depicted within their turbulent familial backgrounds. Mary Agnes Keely – the protagonist of Howard’s novel – decides to escape her dull life with an Irish Catholic widowed mother in Bridgeport, Connecticut for a completely different one in Manhattan, New York. On the other hand, sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes of Yates’s novel are stigmatized by their divorced parents. Nevertheless, throughout four decades, they choose different ways and, therefore, they end up with two options offered by the author to survive: a married life in Sarah’s case and an independent one in Emily’s.
In chapter three, Struggles of Single Parents, the focus has been shifted to the conflicts regarding love, marriage, and caregiving in Yates’s Cold Spring Harbor (1986) and Howard’s A Lover’s Almanac (1998). In Yates’s novel, the protagonists Evan and Rachel are destined to inherit their parents’ faults. On the other hand, in her novel, Howard compares the standpoints of different generations on love. The love story of young Artie and Louise seems to end with the restart of another romance of an old couple fated to meet after half a century.
In the conclusion, differences and similarities between the domestic fiction of Richard Yates and Maureen Howard – in both content and form – have been summed up and the researcher has stated the findings regarding the contribution added by these two novelists to the bulk of social fiction in general.