Home Matters Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction

by Rubenstein, Roberta

• ISBN13: 9780312238759
• ISBN10: 0312238754
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-02-24
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, nostalgia may also function progressively by imaginatively securing, and mending or repairing the past. Looking at fiction by British and American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, Rubenstein explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery, mourning and emotional resolution. She argues that nostalgia is a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural or historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives address a concern in contemporary women's experience: personal and/or cultural displacement are restored--imaginatively, at least--by a vision of healing and emotional repair.

Author Biography

Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American Univesity and author of The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness and Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Home Matters: Longing and Belonging	1	(12)
Part I: Is Mother Home?
Yearning and Nostalgia: Fiction and Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing	13	(24)
Part II: Displacements of/from Home
Home is (Mother) Earth: Animal Dreams	37	(16)
Barbara Kingsolver
Home/lands and Contested Motherhood: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven	53	(12)
Barbara Kingsolver
Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents	65	(16)
Julia Alvarez
Part III: Midlife Nostalgia and Cultural Mourning
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief: Ladder of Years	81	(14)
Anne Tyler
Hom(e)age to the Ancestors: Praisesong for the Widow	95	(16)
Paule Marshall
Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence: Jazz	111	(16)
Toni Morrison
Part IV: Nostalgia for Paradise
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations: Mama Day	127	(14)
Gloria Naylor
Amazing Grace and the Paradox of Paradise: Paradise	141	(26)
Toni Morrison
Fixing the Past, Re-Placing Nostalgia	159	(8)
Notes	167	(28)
Works Cited	195	(10)
Index	205