Description
Book SynopsisAlready 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.
Table of ContentsNotes 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
