Description: Introduction: Home Matters, Longing and Belonging PART ONE: IS MOTHER HOME? Yearning and Nostalgia: Fiction and Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing PART TWO: DISPLACEMENTS OF/FROM HOME Home is (Mother) Earth: Animal Dreams , Barbara Kingsolver Home/lands and Contested Motherhood: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven , Barbara Kingsolver Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home: How the Garca Girls Lost their Accents , Julia Alvarez PART THREE: MIDLIFE NOSTALGIA AND CULTURAL MOURNING Homesickness and the Five Stages of Grief: Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler Hom(e)age to the Ancestors: Praisesong for the Widow , Paule Marshall Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence: Jazz , Toni Morrison PART FOUR: NOSTALGIA FOR PARADISE Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations: Mama Day , Gloria Naylor Amazing Grace: Longing for Paradise and the Good Mother: Paradise , Toni Morrison Conclusion: Fixing the Past, Re-Placing Nostalgia

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