The Scientific Study of People Who Are Single:
An Annotated Bibliography

Bella M. DePaulo
Chair, Academic Advisory Board of the Spectrum Institute
Research and Policy Division of the
American Association for Single People (AASP)

January 2, 2004
 

  


12. Beyond Psychology
 
 
Singles in Fiction, Film, and Television

Scholars from a number of disciplines (usually outside of psychology) have analyzed representations in fiction, film, and television of people who are single. As is so often the case, most of the published writings on these topics are about single women.


Abel, E. (1981). (E)merging identities: The dynamics of female friendship in contemporary fiction by women. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6, 413- 435.

Atkin, D. (1991). The evolution of television series addressing single women, 1966-1990. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 35, 517-523.

Auerbach, N. (1998). Communities of women: An idea in fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Deegan, D. Y. (1951). The stereotype of the single woman in American novels: A social study with implications for the education of women. NY: King’s Crown Press.

Doan, L. L. (1991). Old maids to radical spinsters: Unmarried women in the twentieth-century novel. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Faludi, S. (1991). Backlash: The undeclared war against American women. NY: Crown. (Part 2. The backlash in popular culture.)

Ferguson, S. J. (1991). The old maid stereotype in American film, 1938 to 1965. Film & History, 21, 131-144.

Freeman, R., & Klaus, P. (1984). Blessed or not? The new spinster in England and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Journal of Family History, 9, 394-414.

Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (2000). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination (2nd ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hochman, E. (2002). Fictional females and models: The changing image of women in American novels from 1789 to 1939. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris.

Koppelman, S. (1984). Old maids: Short stories by nineteenth century U.S. women writers. Boston, MA: Pandora Press.

Snyder, K. V. (1999). Bachelors, manhood, and the novel, 1850-1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

  
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