Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
7 - Domesticities and novel narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space . . . For our house is our corner of the world . . . [A]ll really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home . . .
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1957)[H]aving settled my houshold Stuff and Habitation, made me a Table and a Chair, and all as handsome about me as I could, I began to keep my Journal.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)Robinson Crusoe, who left a comfortable middle-class home in England, finds himself stranded on a deserted island, and promptly creates a comfortable middle-class home in its midst. He makes his new corner of the world into a house – two houses, to be precise: his main “fortress” and his “country retreat,” complete with his “family” of dogs, cats, goats, and a parrot, with handy shelves, misshapen pots, raisins, and an umbrella. And when his household stuff is settled, he can begin to write.
Crusoe's domestic management supplies a vignette for the eighteenth-century British novel, which in such sweeping ways is all about home: finding it, losing it, running away from it, replicating it, furnishing it, inhabiting it, remembering it, haunting it. Even the picaresque novels, “homeless” as their rogues go ranging round the world, define themselves by the absence of home, the picaro living by his wits on other people's doorsteps. The house, which houses the home, the domestic, is site of plot, character, action, setting: she is pursued through the chamber; he brandishes a sword in the hall; they meet in the parlor; they avoid each other in the garden; she drops in an elbow-chair; he eavesdrops from the closet; she points the poignard at her breast in the dining-room; they take two chapters to descend a staircase. As Amanda Vickery notes: “Universal but unexamined, homes are implicated in and backdrop to the history of power, gender, the family, privacy, consumerism, design and the decorative arts.”
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 113 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012