Home Matters

ROBERTA RUBENSTEIN is Professor of Literature at American University, where she teaches courses in fiction by women, feminist theory, and modernism. She is the author of The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979) and Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987), and is co-editor of an anthology of international short stories, Worlds of Fiction (Macmillan/Prentice-Hall, 1993). She has published more than thirty articles on modern and contemporary women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrision, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Barbara Kingsolver, and others.

Introduction: Home Matters, Longing and Belonging PART ONE: IS MOTHER HOME? Yearning and Nostalgia: Fiction and Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing PART TWO: DISPLACEMENTS OF/FROM HOME Home is (Mother) Earth: Animal Dreams , Barbara Kingsolver Home/lands and Contested Motherhood: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven , Barbara Kingsolver Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home: How the García Girls Lost their Accents , Julia Alvarez PART THREE: MIDLIFE NOSTALGIA AND CULTURAL MOURNING Homesickness and the Five Stages of Grief: Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler Hom(e)age to the Ancestors: Praisesong for the Widow , Paule Marshall Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence: Jazz , Toni Morrison PART FOUR: NOSTALGIA FOR PARADISE Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations: Mama Day , Gloria Naylor Amazing Grace: Longing for Paradise and the Good Mother: Paradise , Toni Morrison Conclusion: Fixing the Past, Re-Placing Nostalgia