Housing and fiction: representing context, contingency and conjuncture

This chapter will look at fictional representations of housing issues, arguing that narrative depictions of the domestic realm provide valuable insights into the cultural significance of housing. In particular, the chapter argues that a study of the contemporary novel will offer key insights into contemporary experiences of alienation, discrimination, inequality and marginalization. The chapter considers the range of ways of that experiences of housing, home and domestic space have been captured, arguing that the notion of ‘literary truth’ provides an important lens into differential experiences, situated within the framework of class, race and gender. It provides a detailed discussion of three contemporary novels, all situated in inner London, at three distinct periods in time. The novels considered are Sam Selvon’s The Housing Lark (1965), Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). The chapter argues that housing and home are central to ideas about identity, self and transformation. Analysis of literary texts can therefore provide important insights into everyday, quotidian experience, offering understandings of ‘the way we live now’, including insights on subjectivity, cultural geography and social change that are less often encountered in other forms of academic enquiry.