Fictions of Home

This study aims to counter right-wing discourses of belonging. It discusses key theoretical concepts for the study of home, focusing in particular on Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic contributions. The book also maintains that postmodern celebrations of nomadism and exile tend to be incapable of providing an alternative to conservative, xenophobic appropriations of home.In detailed readings of one film and six novels, a view is developed according to which home, as a spatio-temporal imaginary, is rooted in our species being, and as such constitutes the inevitable starting point for any progressive politics."[A] thoroughly impressive, productive and useful work. [... T]he writing is admirably lucid and engaging." - Randall Stevenson, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Edinburgh"[E]ach chapter is insightful and [... the] use of a very wide range of theorists to provide different angles of vision is deftly and impressively handled." - Pam Morris, author of Realism (New Critical Idiom series) & Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism von Mühlheim, Martin