American Houses

Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-90-04-52031-8
Verlag: World Bank Publications

Buch, Englisch, Band 3, 294 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 600 g

Reihe: European Perspectives on the United States

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.

Winner of the Spanish Association for American Studies’ Javier Coy Award 2022 for best edited volume.

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Andrés, Rodrigo

Weitere Mitwirkende

Andrés, Rodrigo

Alsina Rísquez, Cristina

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Rodrigo Andrés, Universitat de Barcelona, is Assistant Professor of American literature and specializes in the Nineteenth Century. He is the author of Herman Melville: poder y amor entre hombres, and has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on the work of Herman Melville.

Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Universitat de Barcelona, is Assistant Professor of American Literature. She has published extensively on twentieth-century U.S. literature, and co-edited the volume Innocence and Loss: Representations of War and National Identity in the United States.