Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture

by Gerry Smyth (Editor), Jo Croft (Editors)

Space has emerged in recent years as a radical category in a range of related disciplines across the humanities. Of the many possible applications of this new interest, some of the most exciting and challenging have addressed the issue of domestic architecture and its function as a space for both the dramatisation and the negotiation of a cluster of highly salient issues concerning, amongst other things, belonging and exclusion, fear and desire, identity and difference. Our House is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays taking as its focus both the prospect and the possibility of ‘the house’. This latter term is taken in its broadest possible resonance, encompassing everything from the great houses so beloved of nineteenth-century English novelists to the caravans and mobile homes of the latterday travelling community, and all points in between. The essays are written by a combination of established and emerging scholars, working in a variety of scholarly disciplines, including literary criticism, sociology, cultural studies, history, popular music, and architecture. No specific school or theory predominates, although the work of two key figures – Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger – is engaged throughout. This collection engages with a number of key issues raised by the increasingly troubled relationship between the cultural (built) and natural environments in the contemporary world. Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Gerry SMYTH and Jo Culture and Domestic Space 1 Joe Houses, Habit and Memory 2 Gerry ‘You understand what domestic architecture ought to be, you do’: Finding Home in The Wind in the Willows 3 Karen The Life of a Country Cottage 4 Ruth Labouring at Aspects of Lifestyle and the Rise of Home Improvement 5 Shane Safe Authenticity, Nostalgia and the Irish House 6 Mari ‘The house … has cancer’: Representations of Domestic Space in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy 7 Scott Building, Dwelling, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and the Reverse Aesthetic 8 Jeff Troubled Domestic Space in Graphic Novels 9 Peter Community, Violence and Resistance in Three Contemporary Women’s Texts 10 Ron Sonic Home Hi-fi and Stereo(types) 11 Jo A Life of Longing Behind the Bedroom Adolescent Space and the Makings of Private Identity 12 Joseph One Widower’s Excavating Some Disturbed Meanings of Domestic Space References Index

268 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2006