{"product_id":"writing-the-great-house-caroline-rody-9780198998761","title":"Writing the Great House: Transformations of a Topos Across World English Fiction","description":"The great house is renowned as the setting for countless English novels and films. But \u003cem\u003eWriting the Great House \u003c\/em\u003eshows 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eRody 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. Rody's emphasis on the transformations of this world-travelling trope is balanced by attention to transnational continuities, including the foundational but continually reformulated plot of inheritance and mis-inheritance; plots of animus against great houses culminating in dramatic scenarios of house burning; and metafictional entrances into the great house library, the place of books inside a house inside a book. A prologue and epilogue bookend this scholarly study with the author's family story, a tale of moving into, through, and eventually out of a big, old American house, attended by gifts, debts, and a public reckoning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Caroline Rody\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0198998767\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780198998761\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 11\/27\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 512\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover","brand":"Caroline Rody","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":49084112535807,"sku":"9780198998761","price":145.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/writing-the-great-house-caroline-rody-9780198998761","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}