Includes bibliographical references (pages218-229) and index.
Contents:
Slums: reading and writing the dwellings of the urban poor -- Boarding and lodging houses: at home with strangers -- Unhomely homes: life writing of the postwar 'scholarship' generation -- Estates: social housing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture -- Conclusion-housing questions.
Summary:
"Domestic interiors and housing environments have historically been portrayed as framing devices for the representation of peoples and social groups. Drawing together a wide and eclectic collection of well-known, and less familiar, works by writers including Charles Booth, Octavia Hill, James Joyce, Pat O'Mara, Rose Macaulay, Patrick Hamilton, Sam Selvon, Sarah Waters, Lynsey Hanley and Andrea Levy, the author reflects upon, and challenges, various myths and truisms of 'home' through an analysis of four distinct British settings: slums, boarding-houses, working-class childhood homes, and housing estates. Her exploration of works of social investigation, fiction and life writing leads to an intricate stock of housing tales that are inherited, shifting, and always revealing about the culture of our times. This book seeks to demonstrate how images of individuals within domestic space -- in literature, history and other cultural forms -- tell powerful and unexpected stories of class, gender, social belonging and exclusion"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.