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This book examines representations of home in literary and visual cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. The collection brings together scholars working on literature, film, and photography with the aim of showcasing new research in a burgeoning field focusing on representations of domesticity. The chapters span a diverse range of contexts from across the world and use a variety of approaches to exploring representations of home including studies of space, material culture, sexuality, gender, multiculturalism, diaspora, memory and archival practice. They include explorations of the Finnish Suburban home on film, home and the diasporic imagination in Chinese Canadian women's writing and the archiving practices and photographs used to document the homes of two gay writers from Australia and New Zealand. By bringing together this range of approaches and subjects, the book explores domestic imaginaries as part of a multi-faceted, mutable and amorphous conception of home in a modern,world context. This collection therefore seeks to further studies of home by investigating how the page, screen and photograph have constructed domestic imaginaries - experiencing, critiquing, reconfiguring and archiving home - in a global age.
List of contents
1. Introduction, Domestic Imaginaries: Navigating the Home in Global Literary and Visual Cultures; Bex Harper and Hollie Price.- Part I: Experiencing and Performing the Home.- 2. The Book, the Napkin Ring and the Salad Bowl: Creating the Perfect Kitchen (or not); Inga Bryden.- 3. Lonely Wives in Perfect Kitchens: The Finnish Suburban Home on Film; Essi Viitanen.- 4. Male Imagination and Representation of Home Spaces in Times of War: Julien Gracq's Un Balcon en Forêt (A Balcony in the Forest); Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert.- Part II: Transgressing Boundaries and Crossing Borders.- 5. Reconfiguring Traditional Domesticity in Latin American Women's Testimonial Literature; Sofia Maniscalco Mason.- 6. In Two Places at the Same Time: Archiving the Domestic in the work of Leonora Carrington and Sally Mann; Alicia Kent.- 7. Beyond the Borders: The Construction of Home and Diasporic Imagination in Chinese Canadian Women's Writing; Fang Tang.- Part III: Restoring, Documenting and Archiving the Home.- 8. Restoring a Home: Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia in Anna Mitgutsch's House of Childhood; Katya Krylova.- 9. Domestic Ethnography, Diaspora and Memory in Baba 1989; Nariman Massoumi.- 10. Queer Chattels and Fixtures: Photography and Materiality in the Homes of Frank Sargeson and Patrick White; Lee Wallace.
About the author
Bex Harper is an independent scholar, teacher, private tutor and life coach, based in London.
Hollie Price is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and a Teaching Associate at Queen Mary, University of London.
Summary
This book examines representations of home in literary and visual cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. The collection brings together scholars working on literature, film, and photography with the aim of showcasing new research in a burgeoning field focusing on representations of domesticity. The chapters span a diverse range of contexts from across the world and use a variety of approaches to exploring representations of home including studies of space, material culture, sexuality, gender, multiculturalism, diaspora, memory and archival practice. They include explorations of the Finnish Suburban home on film, home and the diasporic imagination in Chinese Canadian women’s writing and the archiving practices and photographs used to document the homes of two gay writers from Australia and New Zealand. By bringing together this range of approaches and subjects, the book explores domestic imaginaries as part of a multi-faceted, mutable and amorphous conception of home in a modern,world context. This collection therefore seeks to further studies of home by investigating how the page, screen and photograph have constructed domestic imaginaries – experiencing, critiquing, reconfiguring and archiving home – in a global age.
