A doctorate-holding editor/columnist at an alternative newsweekly, Cooperman dissects the symbolism of and women's ambivalence toward their domestic roles as depicted in recent culturally diverse US feminist fiction. Conceiving housework as "an art and science of the boundaries," she discusses individual authors, novels, and shared motifs: domesticity as ordering chaos, the unappreciated hollow woman, sustaining home ties, powers of life and death, the sacred in the mundane, and reasons for making a home. Includes a decent categorized bibliography, but no index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
