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.

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.

What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's Walden and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character. At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

This book sheds light on the intimate relationship between built space and the mind, exploring the ways in which architecture inhabits and shapes both the memory and the imagination. Examining the role of the house, a recurrent, even haunting, image in art and literature from classical times to the present day, it includes new work by both leading scholars and early career academics, providing fresh insights into the spiritual, social, and imaginative significances of built space. Further, it reveals how engagement with both real and imagined architectural structures has long been a way of understanding the intangible workings of the mind itself.

In this bold intervention into the understanding of the diasporic experience within cultural studies, McCarthy challenges a critical position emergent over the last thirty years (what he calls the 'new marginalism'). He confronts the liberal orthodoxies that prevail in this area, exposing contradictions in the thinking of its major theorists.