Writing the Great House: Transformations of a Topos Across World English Fiction

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.