Housing Romanticism

This special issue on Romantic Houses finds its genesis in two panels on 'Housing Romanticism: Facts and Fantasy' organized by Carmen Casaliggi and Francesca Saggini at the BARS 2019: Romantic Facts and Fantasies conference hosted by the University of Nottingham, England. A short time later a global pandemic with lockdowns and quarantines confined many of us to our homes, conflating living spaces with working places, and changing our understandings and conceptions of, and above all experiences with, house and housing. Against this background, this collection of essays is very much a "home" production, with discussion, writing, research, and editing, taking place in home offices, via Zoom calls, online libraries and cloud repositories, amid our personal living spaces. Likewise, houses in literature are not a mere assemblage of bricks and mortar, roofs, rooms, and furniture. Houses are dwellings that embody lived experiences and the image of the episteme; places that are the products of the experiencing of time, social and cultural forces, power relations, and aesthetics. This special issue on Housing Romanticism engages with the variety of approaches to the study of the house in the Romanic period and explores whether this tenet or fiction of firmness still holds true in a world in flow, continually challenged and rewritten, restructured or dismantled by diasporas, resettlements, border-crossings, and
transformations in identity, society, and culture. This collection of interdisciplinary and comparative articles examines the importance of the house (or other types of dwelling places) as signs reflecting the dynamic interplay of several diverse and contending forces: individual and collective, (trans)national and individual, artistic and theoretical, social, economic, cultural and psychological.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 892230. The PI is Francesca Saggini. See CORDIS website at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/892230