Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England's best known literary figures, Writing Home includes the journalism, book and theater reviews, and diaries of Alan Bennett, as well as "The Lady in the Van," his unforgettable account of Miss Shepherd, a London eccentric who lived in a van in Bennett's garden for more than twenty years. This revised and updated edition includes new material from the author, including more recent diaries and his introduction to his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Madness of King George. A chronicle of one of the most important literary careers of the twentieth century, Writing Home is a classic history of a life in letters.

When the SS Empire Windrush berthed at Tilbury docks in 1948 with 492 ex-servicemen from the Caribbean, it marked the beginning of the post-war migrations to Britain that would form part of modern, multi-cultural Britain. A significant role in this social transformation would be played by the literary and non-literary output of writers from the Caribbean. These writers in exile were responsible not just for the establishment of the West Indian novel, but, by virtue of their location in the Mother Country, were also the pioneers of black writing in Britain. Over the next fifty years, this writing would come to represent an important body of work intimately aligned to the evolving and contentious notions of 'home' as economic migration became a permanent presence. In this book, David Ellis provides in-depth analyses of six key figures whose writing charts the establishment of black Britain. For Sam Selvon, George Lamming, and E. R. Braithwaite, writing home represents a literature of reappraisal as the myths of empire -- the gold-paved streets of London -- conflict with the harsh realities of being designated an immigrant. The unresolved consequences of this reappraisal are made evident in the works of Andrew Salkey, Wilson Harris, and Linton Kwesi Johnson where radicalism in both political and literary terms can be read as a response to the rejection of the black communities by an increasingly divided Britain in the 1970s. Finally, the novels of Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley, and David Dabydeen mark an increasingly reflective literature as the notion of home shifts more explicitly from the Caribbean to Britain itself. Containing both contextual and biographical information throughout, "Writing Home" represents a literary and social history of the emergence of black Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

Writing Home is the critically annotated correspondence of Emma Alderson, an 1840s immigrant from England to Ohio, mingling details of daily life with observations on slavery, American customs, religious communities, the impending war with Mexico, and more. Ending with Alderson's death in 1847, the letters formed the basis for Mary Howitt's popular children's book Our Cousins in Ohio (1849).

Ideas of home, place and identity have been continually questioned, re-imagined and re-constructed in Northern Irish poetry. Concentrating on the period since the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s, this study provides a detailed consideration of the work of several generations of poets, from Hewitt and MacNeice, to Fiacc and Montague, to Simmons, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to Muldoon, Carson, Paulin and McGuckian, to McDonald, Morrissey, Gillis and Flynn. It traces the extent to which their writing represents a move away from concepts of rootedness and towards a deterritorialized poetics of displacement, mobility, openness and pluralism in an era of accelerating migration and globalisation. In the new readings of place, inherited maps are no longer reliable, and home is no longer the stable ground of identity but seems instead to be always where it is not. The crossing of boundaries and the experience of diaspora open up new understandings of the relations between places, a new sense of the permeability and contingency of cultures, and new concepts of identity and home. Professor ELMER KENNEDY-ANDREWS teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ulster.

In this engrossing memoir, poet and literacy scholar Eli Goldblatt shares the intimate ways reading and writing influenced the first thirty years of his life—in the classroom but mostly outside it. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography traces Goldblatt’s search for home and his growing recognition that only through his writing life can he fully contextualize the world he inhabits. Goldblatt connects his educational journey as a poet and a teacher to his conception of literacy, and assesses his intellectual, emotional, and political development through undergraduate and postgraduate experiences alongside the social imperatives of the era. He explores his decision to leave medical school after he realized that he could not compartmentalize work and creative life or follow in his surgeon father’s footsteps. A brief first marriage rearranged his understanding of gender and sexuality, and a job teaching in an innercity school initiated him into racial politics. Literacy became a dramatic social reality when he witnessed the start of the national literacy campaign in postrevolutionary Nicaragua and spent two months finding his bearings while writing poetry in Mexico City. Goldblatt presents a thoughtful and exquisitely crafted narrative of his life to illustrate that literacy exists at the intersection of individual and social life and is practiced in relationship to others. While the concept of literacy autobiography is a common assignment in undergraduate and graduate writing courses, few books model the exercise. Writing Home helps fill that void and, with Goldblatt’s emphasis on “out of school” literacy, fosters an understanding of literacy as a social practice.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

For the last two years, acclaimed theologian Amy Laura Hall has written a lively, wide-ranging, opinionated column for her local newspaper. In her column, Hall has sought--without flatly rejecting globalism--to think and act locally. She has also responded to what she sees as a disturbing Christian turn toward asceticism and away from abundance. Drawing from her scholarship, but also from conversations at coffee shops and around the dinner table, Hall's "missives of love" engage topics such as school dress codes, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, LGBTQ dignity, and bullies in the workplace. They draw richly and variously on pop songs, dead saints, young adult literature, and many stories about actual neighbors and family members. Often offbeat and always riveting, they ask how the world around us works and can work much better for the sake of daily truth and flourishing.