Writing the Great House

Abstract Writing the Great House: Transformations of a Topos across World English Fiction is a wide-ranging, comparative study that treats the figure of the great house as a singularly important trope in the history of the novel and as a world literary topos. It traces the great house’s movements across multiple Anglophone literatures as a peculiarly illustrative literary emblem of any national imaginary and a revealing indicator of cross-national literary influence. It argues for a homology at work between fictional book and house—both three-dimensional containers of people and plots—which carries the suggestion that the great house ultimately in question is the house of the nation itself. The book is composed of fifteen chapters and an introduction and organized into three parts: Part I on the dramatic contrast between English and American great house fictional traditions; Part II on the transformation of the revered great house topos in literatures of empire and slavery from the United States, India, South Africa, Ireland, England, and the Caribbean; and Part III on big houses in English and American fictions written after the great house era. The emphasis on the metamorphosis of this world-travelling trope is balanced by attention to continuities, including plots of inheritance and mis-inheritance, great house burnings, and metafictional scenes in great house libraries. A prologue and epilogue ground this scholarly study in the author’s family story of moving into, through, and out of a big, old American house, with its attendant gifts, debts, and public reckoning.