Research Catalog

Title

Novel houses : twenty famous fictional dwellings / Christina Hardyment.

Author

Hardyment, Christina

Publication

• Oxford : Bodleian Library, 2020.
• ©2019

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

250 pages : illustrations (some color), plans; 24 cm

Summary

Novel Houses' visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer who created it. We discover Uncle Tom's Cabin's powerful influence on the American Civil War, how essential 221B Baker Street was to Sherlock Holmes and the importance of Bag End to the adventuring hobbits who called it home. It looks at why Bleak House is used as the name of a happy home and what was on Jane Austen's mind when she worked out the plot of Mansfield Park. Little-known background on the dwellings at the heart of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm emerges, and the real life settings of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and E.M. Forster's Howards End, so fundamental to their stories, are shown to relate closely to their authors' passions and preoccupations. A winning combination of literary criticism, geography and biography, this is an entertaining and insightful celebration of beloved novels and the extraordinary role that houses grand and small, imagined and real, or unique and ordinary, play in their continuing popularity

Alternative Title

• Twenty famous fictional dwellings
• 20 famous fictional dwellings
• Fictional dwellings

Subject

• Imaginary places
• English fiction > History and criticism
• American fiction > History and criticism
• Home in literature
• Dwellings in literature
• American fiction
• English fiction

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-244) and index

Contents

Introduction: The house as hero -- A triumphant illusion: Horace Walpole's The castle of Otranto (1764) -- The bewildered house: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) -- Bridging two worlds: Walter Scott's Waverly (1814) -- A plague on both your houses: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) -- Dark romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) -- Tomb for the living: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) -- Kitchen table society: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin (1852) -- Bachelor lair: Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927) -- Household gods: Henry James's The spoils of Poynton (1896) -- Property: John Galsworthy's The Forsyte saga (1906-21) -- Anchorage: E.M. Forster's Howard's End (1910) -- Colossal illusion: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The great Gatsby (1925) -- The queerest sense of echo: Virginia Woolfe's Orlando (1928) & Vita Sackville West's The Edwardians (1930) -- Sheer flapdoodle: Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm (1932) -- House of secrets: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) -- A household of the faith: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead revisited (1945) -- The sorcerer's tower: Dodie Smith's I capture the castle (1948) -- Vast shambles: Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1947-59) -- Deep roots: J. R. R. Tolkien's The hobbit (1937) & The lord of the rings (1954-55) -- Castle of ancient magic: J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter (1997-2007) -- Afterword -- Gazetteer

Call Number

JFE 20-1008

ISBN

• 9781851244805
• 1851244808

OCLC

1135984035

Author

Hardyment, Christina, author.

Title

Novel houses : twenty famous fictional dwellings / Christina Hardyment.

Publisher

Oxford : Bodleian Library, 2020.

Copyright Date

©2019

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-244) and index

Research Call Number

JFE 20-1008