Grotesque Relations Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State

Offering a sharp corrective to the existing literature on the topic, Grotesque Relations explores the vexed relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. Whereas extant criticism focuses on the New Deal, Susan Edmunds returns to the Progressive Era, when maternalist reformers linked early welfare initiatives to a discourse of social housekeeping that extended domestic roles into civic life. Highlighting the unique importance of a modern sentimental project of domestic reform to the formation of the U.S. welfare state, Edmunds deftly demonstrates how modernist writers shaped-and misshaped-their domestic fiction in response to new state and market investments in the home.

Susan Edmunds is an Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University, where she has taught since 1992.