Introduction

Abstract The Introduction, “House: Book: Nation,” articulates this book’s conception of the great house as a world literary topos, one that crosses multiple Anglophone literatures as a peculiarly illustrative literary emblem of a given nation or national imaginary and a revealing indicator of cross-national literary influence and transformation. It argues for an intriguing homology at work between fictional book and house—both three-dimensional containers of people and plots—which carries the always-hovering suggestion that the great house ultimately in question is the house of the social order, of the national literature, even of the nation itself. Some sections of the Introduction invoke bodies of scholarship with which this study is in conversation and discuss terminology the study employs. Others explore the symbolic and structural functions of houses in fiction; the parallels between books and the houses inside them; the distinctive social and narrative meanings of great literary houses; the power of great literary houses to represent national epistemes; and several key threads that traverse the chapters to come, including plots of house burning and metafictional scenes set in great house libraries. It also includes a precis of all chapters.