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Pauline Dewan. The House as Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children's Literature. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004.
Houses are omnipresent constructs in our literary traditions, so essential to human identity that the house itself can define a story: Mansfield Park, Bleak House, The House of the Seven Gables, Howard's End. "House" and its attendant "home" embrace a complex of experiences, myths, political realities, and desires. Within the house, one gains a mythos of origin, one measures one's development, one experiences justice or injustice, healing love or its opposite, and one steps into new social roles, some desired and others imposed. In its deepest sense, the concept of the house roots itself in spiritual soil. In the human imagination, the sense of home can expand to include the entire earth, even the universe, or contract into the smallest spaces. Its reach is material and immaterial. As concept and symbol, then, the house or home proves enormously variable. That is its power as archetype. Across cultures, the idea of home stands as a central motif and human obsession. In children's and young adult literature, however, the house is particularly resonant, for maturation, identity, and adaptation to life's circumstances are such central themes. The home, as scholar Pauline Dewan asserts, is "a child's first universe" (4). What happens in this first universe is the stuff of memorable storytelling.
As Dewan's study reveals, all genres of children's literature spin out stories of home. The range of relevant titles in a study of the house is voluminous. Dewan's encyclopedic knowledge of the literary traditions in children's literature is one of the strengths of her study. Her careful readings of such diverse authors as Laura Ingalls Wilder,...