Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time

Offering a strikingly original treatment of feminist literature, Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory argues that feminist novels served as a means of narrating and negotiating the perceived decline of American progress after the 1960s. Elliott analyzes popular tropes ranging from the white middle class housewife trapped in endless domestic labor to the woman of color haunted by a traumatic past--exploring the way in which feminist narratives represented women as unable to access positive futures. In a powerful new reading of temporality in contemporary fiction, Elliott posits that feminism’s image of women trapped in time operated as a potent allegory for the apparent breakdown of futurity in postmodernity.