Living with Strangers

Chiara Briganti is former Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Carleton College, USA and Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London, UK. Kathy Mezei is Professor Emerita at Simon Fraser University, Canada and Life Member, Clare Hall, Cambridge.

"Living with Strangers constitutes an imaginative, historically and culturally informed array of essays that depict life in bedsits and boarding houses during a crucial period of British literary and cultural history. - Maria DiBattista, Princeton University, USABedsits and boarding houses provided alternatives for those for whom, for a variety of reasons, the family home was not an option. Living with Strangers is an evocative account of alternative domestic spaces as represented in fiction, art, theatre and film. It gets to the heart of how, from the mid twentieth century onwards, social marginality in modern England was largely expressed by where and with what people lived. - Penny Sparke, Kingston University, UKThis book is a valuable and original addition to the growing interdisciplinary literature on the home, and will be the first scholarly collection to look at bedsits and boarding-houses as a distinct social formation. - Victoria Rosner, Columbia University, USA"

• List of ImagesList of ContributorsAcknowledgementsSeries preface: Why Home?, Rosie Cox and Victor BuchliIntroduction, Chiara Briganti (King’s College London, UK) and Kathy Mezei (Simon Fraser University, Canada)1. Aspidistras and Divans: Transient Spaces in the London Novel, 1920s to 1940s, Kathy Mezei (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Chiara Briganti (King’s College London, UK)2. Immortal Apples and Eternal Eggs: Life and Still Life in the Bedsits of Bloomsbury, Hana Leaper (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)3. Writing in a Bedsitter: Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, Paul Delany (Simon Fraser University, Canada)4. In a Queer Room, 1900-1970, Mark Armstrong (Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, UK)5. Thieves in the House: Ealing Comedy and the Criminal Lodger, Michael Newton (Leiden University, Netherlands)6. Cold Rooms in the Post-War London Novel, Chiara Briganti (King’s College London, UK) and Kathy Mezei (Simon Fraser University, Canada)7. London’s Post-War Housing Crisis and Detective Fiction, Allingham, Christie, Marsh, June Sturrock (Simon Fraser University, Canada)8. Precarious Living in the Films of Ken Loach, Luke Davies (Tübingen University, Germany)9. Leave to Remain: Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum, Emily Cuming (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)Index