| Yhteenveto: | This chapter extends Bachelardian theory through discussion of Charles Dickens’s fascination with rented houses. Such houses have typically been excluded from Heideggerian–Bachelardian readings of architectural space, yet Dasgupta argues that imaginative engagement with the rented house significantly informs the plots of the nineteenth-century <i>Bildungsroman</i>. Focusing on <i>David Copperfield</i> and <i>Great Expectations</i>, she demonstrates that Dickens’ metaphors of rented space indicate how his narrators perceive the world around them, make sense of their lives and express themselves on paper. Like Swift, Dasgupta is concerned with the location of the self; like Chaudhuri, she examines ways in which the house may be imagined as a kind of self, while the self in turn is understood in terms of the domestic sphere.
|
|---|