Opening the Gatehouse: On and Around “Housing Romanticism”

This special issue of European Romantic Review on “Housing Romanticism” raises key questions about the importance of houses as a critical touchstone of both modernity and contemporaneity. From the conservative ideal of the Great Good Place of eighteenth-century poetry, rooted in classical antiquity, through the Georgian country house, the Regency town house, the Victorian poetics of the hearth, and the Modernist fictions of “bricks and mortar” firmness to today’s paper and screen re-readings of the country house idyll (from Austen to Altman, from Ishiguro to Tan), our culture is saturated with narratives of houses and houses whose stories await to be narrated. More recently, home makeover shows (the counterpart of cosmetic and fashion makeover shows) have drawn prime-time attention to critical concepts such as improvement, transformation, and self-fashioning, thus spectacularizing and deconstructing the Bachelardian intimate poetics of home. However, Gaston Bachelard’s words can still offer a solid conceptual and methodological point of departure for all those scholars who want to approach and reconfigure house studies from renewed angles through the transversal, multi-dimensional avenues opened by migration studies, urban anthropology, art history, and affect theory: “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space”.