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

• Superior document: European Perspectives on the United States ; 3
• TeilnehmendeR: Andrés, Rodrigo,; Rísquez, Cristina Alsina,
• 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.

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.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors -- 1 American Houses, American Literature / Rodrigo Andrés -- 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” / Rodrigo Andrés -- 3 Paths Well-Trodden and “Desire Lines” in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House / Cristina Alsina Rísquez -- 4 Queering the American Family Home: The Aesthetics of Place and the Ethos of Domesticity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic / Elena Ortells -- 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 / Cynthia Lytle -- 6 The Haunted Plantation: Ghosts, Graves, and Transformation as Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman / Ian Green -- 7 A House is a House is a House: Toni Morrison’s Politics of Domesticity, Redemption and Healing in Beloved and Home / Mar Gallego -- 8 The Politics of Affect with/in the African American Mansion in Stephanie Powell Watts’s No One Is Coming to Save Us / Vicent Cucarella-Ramon -- 9 “A Lot More Deadly”: Gender and the Black Spatial Imaginary in U.S. Prison Writings / Eva Puyuelo Ureña -- PART 3: Troubled Boundaries of the Domestic Space -- 10 Thoreau’s Unhoused / Michael Jonik -- 11 Too Tight for Comfort: Shipboard Distance as the Prerequisite for Personal Intimacy in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket / Arturo Corujo -- 12 “Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S. Fiction / Cynthia Stretch -- 13 Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth: A Manifesto in Adobe as a Response to Houselessness and Domicide in Post-Depression Years / Carme Manuel -- 14 The Arrivant in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Deviation, Iteration, Intersection / Paula Martín-Salván -- 15 “A house at odds with itself”: Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered / Dolores Resano -- 16 Afterword: In a Fictional House / Wyn Kelley -- Index.