American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire

Rodrigo Andrés, Universitat de Barcelona, is Assistant Professor of American literature and specializes in the Nineteenth Century. He is the author of Herman Melville: poder y amor entre hombres, and has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on the work of Herman Melville.Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Universitat de Barcelona, is Assistant Professor of American Literature. She has published extensively on twentieth-century U.S. literature, and co-edited the volume Innocence and Loss: Representations of War and National Identity in the United States.

• Notes on Contributors1 American Houses, American LiteratureRodrigo AndrésPART 1: Houses: Queer Affiliations and Temporalities2 The House as Alternative to Familial Space and Time in Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney”Rodrigo Andrés3 Paths Well-Trodden and “Desire Lines” in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s HouseCristina Alsina Rísquez4 Queering the American Family Home: The Aesthetics of Place and the Ethos of Domesticity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family TragicomicElena OrtellsPART 2: The Legacy of the House Divided5 Cape Coast Castle in the Sky: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the Im/possibility of the American DreamCynthia Lytle6 The Haunted Plantation: Ghosts, Graves, and Transformation as Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure WomanIan Green 7 A House is a House is a House: Toni Morrison’s Politics of Domesticity, Redemption and Healing in Beloved and HomeMar Gallego8 The Politics of Affect with/in the African American Mansion in Stephanie Powell Watts’s No One Is Coming to Save UsVicent Cucarella-Ramon9 “A Lot More Deadly”: Gender and the Black Spatial Imaginary in U.S. Prison WritingsEva Puyuelo UreñaPART 3: Troubled Boundaries of the Domestic Space10 Thoreau’s UnhousedMichael Jonik11 Too Tight for Comfort: Shipboard Distance as the Prerequisite for Personal Intimacy in Herman Melville’s White-JacketArturo Corujo12 “Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S. FictionCynthia Stretch13 Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth: A Manifesto in Adobe as a Response to Houselessness and Domicide in Post-Depression YearsCarme Manuel14 The Arrivant in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Deviation, Iteration, IntersectionPaula Martín-Salván15 “A house at odds with itself”: Barbara Kingsolver’s UnshelteredDolores Resano16 Afterword: In a Fictional HouseWyn KelleyIndex

"Reading American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire constitutes a thorough academic experience. Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez have managed to compile a wide array of perspectives on the influence, significance and application of the American house as a literary trope. The editors’ efforts have resulted in a well-wrought, innovative scholarly narrative, which caters for new considerations of the concepts of home, house, or dwelling, and their implications for both collective and individual identities. […] In short, American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire is highly recommendable for its intellectual rigour, its insightful contributions and its innovative approach to the analysis of the American house." – Richard Jorge, Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, in: Nexus 2 (2023), pp. 91-94