Great Houses in English Literary Tradition

Abstract Part I of the book, “Great Literary Houses: English and American Paradigms,” opens with Chapter 1, “Great Houses in English Literary Tradition,” which examines seventeenth- to nineteenth-century literary texts. First considering the English “power houses” that crown a hierarchical social order upon the English countryside, this chapter argues that although they have increasingly been linked to a history of exploitation of the laboring classes and of the subjects of the far-flung British empire, the country house as institution and “heritage” site continues in general to be esteemed as embodiment of Englishness and as the nation’s outstanding artistic achievement, inextricable from the English landscape. Such is the case, this chapter observes, in literature as well. It focuses on the genre of the country house novel, replete with texts that become stages for comic social plots, and the country house poem, which enshrines a vision of right, rural order centered upon the great house. In both genres, inequality and discord tend to give way to visions of social harmony; English fictions do not reject the institution of the great house because of the human conflict arising within it. One country house poem’s account of the great house library untouched by a snoozing heir begins an investigation, spanning the chapters of this study, into the meanings of the mise en abyme that is the room of books inside a house inside a book.