Worlding Domesticity: Transnational Methodology and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

This thesis examines how we might read a domestic novel, such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, as a transnational one. Contemporary critics have thus far characterized only those novels as transnational which include foreign characters, signs of alterity and difference or global networks. In this thesis, I engage in a methodological debate, and argue that the representation of domesticity naturally opens out to a global network, which is the very matter against which the sphere of the domestic is defined.