Home, Maison, Casa

Erica L. Johnson

"Erica L. Johnson's exploration of home responds to critical work by postcolonial and feminist theorists on the themes of displacement and exile, and draws on recent work by geographers and historians as well as literary critics. Home, Maison, Casa addresses questions raised by criticism on exile and displacement, such as: from what are exiled subjects displaced? From what manner of "home" are they exiled?" "The book is concerned with homes, maisons, and case - English, French, and Italian words which refer to a similar idea yet which reveal, together, that the notion of being at home, a la maison, or a case pivots on the axis of material dwelling places as well as the more abstract concept of being at home, or chez soi." "Building on this complex concept of home generated by this comparatist framework, the author examines the concept of home in the novels of Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro, writers who grew up in the colonial contexts of British Dominica, French Indochina, and Italian Eritrea, respectively. As young women, all three writers were repatriated to European "homelands" unfamiliar to them. Far from resorting to nostalgic narratives of their childhoods in the colonies, however, Rhys, Duras, and Dell'Oro present fractured, often ambivalent memories of the lands of their births in their writing."--BOOK JACKET.