American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire

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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

American Houses, American Literature, Rodrigo Andrés     1

PART 1: HOUSES: QUEER AFFILIATIONS AND TEMPORALITIES

The House as Alternative to Familial Space and Time in Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney”, Rodrigo Andrés     17

Paths Well-Trodden and “Desire Lines” in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Cristina Alsina Rísquez     39

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     58

PART 2: THE LEGACY OF THE HOUSE DIVIDED

Cape Coast Castle in the Sky: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the Im/possibility of the American Dream, Cynthia Lytle     77

The Haunted Plantation: Ghosts, Graves, and Transformation as Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Ian Green     97

A House is a House is a House: Toni Morrison’s Politics of Domesticity, Redemption and Healing in Beloved and Home, Mar Gallego    115

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     135

“A Lot More Deadly”: Gender and the Black Spatial Imaginary in U.S. Prison Writings, Eva Puyuelo Ureña     153

PART 3: TROUBLED BOUNDARIES OF THE DOMESTIC SPACE

Thoreau’s Unhoused, Michael Jonik     173

Too Tight for Comfort: Shipboard Distance as the Prerequisite for Personal Intimacy in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket, Arturo Corujo     190

“Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S. Fiction, Cynthia Stretch     208

Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth: A Manifesto in Adobe as a Response to Houselessness and Domicide in Post-Depression Years, Carme Manuel     226

The Arrivant in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Deviation, Iteration, Intersection, Paula Martín-Salván     244

“A house at odds with itself”: Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, Dolores Resano     266

Afterword: In a Fictional House, Wyn Kelley     283