Explores the affective, ethical, and political demands that difficult reading places on readers of midcentury Latin American literature The radical formal experiments undertaken by writers across Latin America in the mid-twentieth century introduced friction, opacity, and self-reflexivity to the very act of reading. Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America explores the limitations and the possibilities of literature for conveying place-specific forms of life. Focusing on authors such as José María Arguedas, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan José Saer, who are often celebrated for universalizing regional themes, Ashley R. Brock brings a new critical lens to Latin American writers who were ambivalent toward their era’s “boom.” Beyond mere resistance to or critique of the commodification and political instrumentalization of rural topics and types, this countertrend of critical regionalism positions readers themselves as outsiders, pushing them to engage their senses, to train their attention, and to learn to dwell in unknown textual landscapes. Dwelling in Fiction draws on a transnational community of thinkers and writers to show how their midcentury aesthetic practices of sensorial pedagogy anticipate contemporary turns toward affect, embodiment, decoloniality, and ecological thought.

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.

From the gothic fantasies of Walpole’s Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to examine how authors’ personal experiences helped to shape the homes that have become icons of English literature. We encounter Jane Austen drinking ‘too much wine’ in the lavish ballroom of a Hampshire manor, discover how Virginia Woolf’s love of Talland House at St Ives is palpable in To the Lighthouse, and find Evelyn Waugh remembering Madresfield Court as he plots Charles Ryder’s return to Brideshead. Drawing on historical sources, biographies, letters, diaries and the novels themselves, House of Fiction opens the doors to these celebrated houses, while offering candid glimpses of the writers who brought them to life.

Patrick West’s Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story cultivates the potential for literary representations of architectural space to contribute to the development of a contemporary politics of Australian post-colonialism. West argues that the predominance of tropes of place within cultural and critical expressions of Australian post-colonialism should be re-balanced through attention to spatial strategies of anti-colonial power. To elaborate the raw material of such strategies, West develops interdisciplinary close readings of keynote stories within three female-authored, pan-twentieth century, Australian short-story collections: Bush Studies by Barbara Baynton (1902); Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard (1932); and White Turtle: A Collection of Short Stories by Merlinda Bobis (1999). The capacity of the short-story form to prompt creative and politically germinal engagements with species of space associated with architecture and buildings is underscored. Relatedly, West argues that the recent resurgence of binary thought—on local, national, and international scales—occasions an approach to the short-story collections shaped by binary relationships like a dichotomy of inside and outside. Concluding his argument, West connects the literary and architectural critiques of the story collections to the wicked problem, linked to ongoing colonial violences, of improving Australian Indigenous housing outcomes. Innovative and interdisciplinary, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Literary, Architectural, and Postcolonial Studies. .

Through an analysis of the writings of three 20th century Indian women, this book explores how the memoirs, fictions, and histories written by women can be read as counter-narratives of colonial modernity.

Embraced for the dramatic opportunities afforded by a house full of strangers, the British boarding house emerged as a setting for novels published during the interwar period by a diverse range of women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf. To use the single room in the boarding house or bedsit, Terri Mullholland argues, is to foreground a particular experience. While the single room represents the freedoms of independent living available to women in the early twentieth century, it also marks the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives. By placing their characters in this transient space, women writers could explore women's changing social roles and complex experiences – amateur prostitution, lesbian relationships, extra-marital affairs, and abortion – outside traditional domestic narrative concerns. Mullholland presents new readings of works by canonical and non-canonical writers, including Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction written and read by women, the literature of the single room merges modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.

Like its companion volume, "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction", this massive reference of 4,000 entries covers all aspects of fantasy, from literature to art.

Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us–entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment of humans’ relationships with and perceptions of the world entailed by a modern ontology, this book illustrates the power of ecopoetics to attune humans to the vibrant matter both within and outside of us. Braiding indigenous with non-indigenous worldviews, this book tackles ecopoetics emerging from varying locations in the world. It underscores the postmodernist, remythologizing processes going on in many ecopoetic texts, via magical realist modes and mythopoeia.

The haunted house of American fiction is an iconic union of setting and theme with an enduring presence in popular culture that traces its lineage to the early English Gothic novels. Blurring the boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead, the haunted house--synonymous with the dark side of domesticity--challenges accepted notions of reality and wields a special power over the reader's imagination. Focusing on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson and Stephen King, this critical work offers a fresh perspective on one of the most popular motifs in American fiction. Case studies demonstrate how these authors have kept the past alive while highlighting the complexities of modern society, using their ghostly tales to celebrate and challenge 20th century American history and culture.