American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire / / edited by Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez.

Already in 1854, Henry David Thoreau had declared in Walden that “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is” (225). Like Thoreau, many other renowned American writers have considered what houses are and, particularly, what houses do, and they have created fictional dwellings that func...

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Bibliographic Details
Superior document:European Perspectives on the United States ; 3
TeilnehmendeR:
Place / Publishing House:Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2022.
Year of Publication:2022
Edition:1st ed.
Language:English
Series:European Perspectives on the United States ; 3.
Physical Description:1 online resource (298 pages)
Notes:This volume analyses the representation of domestic spaces in landmark texts of American literature, focusing on the relationship between houses and subjectivities, and illustrates the necessity and benefits of integrating materiality and housing research into the field of literary studies.
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Other title:Notes on Contributors --
1 American Houses, American Literature /
PART 1: Houses: Queer Affiliations and Temporalities --
2 The House as Alternative to Familial Space and Time in Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” /
3 Paths Well-Trodden and “Desire Lines” in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House /
4 Queering the American Family Home: The Aesthetics of Place and the Ethos of Domesticity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic /
PART 2: The Legacy of the House Divided --
5 Cape Coast Castle in the Sky: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the Im/possibility of the American Dream /
6 The Haunted Plantation: Ghosts, Graves, and Transformation as Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman /
7 A House is a House is a House: Toni Morrison’s Politics of Domesticity, Redemption and Healing in Beloved and Home /
8 The Politics of Affect with/in the African American Mansion in Stephanie Powell Watts’s No One Is Coming to Save Us /
9 “A Lot More Deadly”: Gender and the Black Spatial Imaginary in U.S. Prison Writings /
PART 3: Troubled Boundaries of the Domestic Space --
10 Thoreau’s Unhoused /
11 Too Tight for Comfort: Shipboard Distance as the Prerequisite for Personal Intimacy in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket /
12 “Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S. Fiction /
13 Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth: A Manifesto in Adobe as a Response to Houselessness and Domicide in Post-Depression Years /
14 The Arrivant in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Deviation, Iteration, Intersection /
15 “A house at odds with itself”: Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered /
16 Afterword: In a Fictional House /
Index.
Summary:Already in 1854, Henry David Thoreau had declared in Walden that “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is” (225). Like Thoreau, many other renowned American writers have considered what houses are and, particularly, what houses do, and they have created fictional dwellings that function not only as settings, but as actual central characters in their works. The volume is specifically concerned with the structure, the organization, and the objects inside houses, and argues that the space defined by rooms and their contents influences the consciousness, the imaginations, and the experiences of the humans who inhabit them. Contributors are: Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Rodrigo Andrés, Vicent Cucarella-Ramon, Arturo Corujo, Mar Gallego, Ian Green, Michael Jonik, Wyn Kelley, Cynthia Lytle, Carme Manuel, Paula Martín-Salván, Elena Ortells, Eva Puyuelo-Ureña, Dolores Resano, and Cynthia Stretch.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9004521119
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: edited by Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez.