Writing the Great House

The great house is renowned as the setting for countless English novels and films. But Writing the Great House shows it to be not only an influential icon in the history of the European novel but also a topos that metamorphoses as it travels through world literature. In this wide-ranging, comparative study, Caroline Rody traces the great house's movements across multiple Anglophone literatures---from the venerable English manor house to, among many variations, the guilty New England gabled mansion; the slavery-tainted U.S. Southern or Caribbean plantation house; the politically fraught Anglo-Irish Big House; the Indian palimpsestic "history house"; and the evil American haunted house---a literary house continually remodeled so as to serve as illustrative emblem of any people's distinctive imaginary. Rody identifies an intriguing 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. Rody's emphasis on the transformations of this world-travelling trope is balanced by attention to transnational continuities, including the foundational but continually reformulated plot of inheritance and mis-inheritance; plots of animus against great houses culminating in dramatic scenarios of house burning; and metafictional entrances into the great house library, the place of books inside a house inside a book. A prologue and epilogue bookend this scholarly study with the author's family story, a tale of moving into, through, and eventually out of a big, old American house, attended by gifts, debts, and a public reckoning.

Caroline Rody is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Daughter's Return: African American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History (Oxford University Press, 2001).