In recent years, the interest in the house has grown irresistibly, to the point that in many ways houses seem to be situated at the very core of the creative, artistic and cultural domains of contemporaneity. Their presence sprawls across the media, from magazines to TV programmes, and across the globe, possibly because as repositories of the human, houses have a long-standing and profound connection not only with men and women but, at a deeper level, with the ways of representing man’s world, across its declinations of gender, class, and race. Houses – the perennial, ubiquitous and silent background to our daily lives – could many “a tale unfold”: the tales of their inhabitants and/in their relationships with others, of the times they lived in, of their configurations of the world, as well as the visions (and nightmares) of the artists who created them. This collection offers a comprehensive and transdisciplinary look at the paper houses of English Literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Among the configurations addressed, the authors investigate the domestic spatialization of authority, gendered houses, narratives of household construction and deconstruction, exotic mansions, fin-de-siècle habitats, haunted edifices, and houses in detective and Gothic fiction.
