HOUSES IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL: MODERNISMS, EKPHRASES, AND THRESHOLDS1
HOUSES IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL: MODERNISMS, EKPHRASES, AND THRESHOLDS1

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses diegetic techniques in set-piece descriptions of houses and gardens in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels and stories (Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, The Awakening, Prelude, Howards End, The Rainbow, and Saint Mawr). It demonstrates how certain topics and tropes, dating back to classical antiquity, can be traced through this period, and how they record some of the great nineteenth-century and early modern concerns: urbanization, industry and industriousness, conspicuous display, alienation, gender roles, the resilience of romantic notions of nature, and, underlying all, a sense of mutability and precariousness undermining stability.

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