Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[Leckie's] comparative and innovative readings of classic novels are fresh, informative, and full of interesting details . . . [E]fforts to tell an alternative story of nineteenth-century modernity by connecting housing reform documentary literature and British novels are appreciated and should be taken seriously." *
Modern Language Review *
"[An] important and impressive work . . .
Open Houses provides not only superb readings of recovered documentary and canonical literary sources, it also provides a model for scholarship rooted in politics . . .[Leckie] provides us with an important re-examination of housing in nineteenth-century Britain and British fiction, with an eye toward the problem Martin Heidegger raises: how should we understand the role of the home in an age of precarity and poverty." *
Romance, Revolution & Reform *
"
Open Houses is a stimulating, provocative book convincingly underpinned by extensive research, sharp critical readings, and a confident familiarity with current theory. Barbara Leckie is an excellent critic of nineteenth-century fiction, but her conspicuous achievement is to bring fictional and nonfictional writings in dialogue with one another in a way that sheds light on both." * Kate Flint, University of Southern California *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. "Let Us Look Into the House" 1
Chapter 1. A Simple Idea of Architecture
Chapter 2. The Dark Side of the Interior
Chapter 3. "The Ruined House": Charles Dickens's Bleak House
Chapter 4. The Mediating Imagination: George Eliot's Middlemarch
Chapter 5. The Interpenetrating Imagination: Henry James's The Princess Casamassima
Conclusion. The Epistemology of the House
Notes
Bibliography
Index
