The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was all written during the First World War, but that war is frequently absent. He is an unusual war poet: an ‘Arts and Crafts’ war poet; a war poet who is focused on home but nonetheless committed to action and engagement with the world; a modern poet at home in the old wars and with the old tunes; a war poet of peacefulness. Thomas’s poetry addresses the war in its own way, directly and indirectly, with its own inclusive, hesitant, honest voice. We can see the uniqueness of his approach by looking at poems like ‘Adlestrop’, ‘The Manor Farm’, ‘The Combe’, ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’, ‘The Owl’, ‘A Private’, ‘Digging’ and ‘Tears’. Thomas said of war poetry that ‘No other class of poetry vanishes so rapidly, has so little chosen from it for posterity’, but his own survived, and not simply because it contained very little of the war.

Material culture studies have long incorporated analysis of domestic environments and dynamics of home in shaping culture, rituals of power, and more. This chapter examines the centrality of home, domestic environments, and communal living experiments to understanding people.

Television is an innately Gothic medium, bringing immaterial figures and stories of the horrors of the past and present into the family home. Across the development of television it has engaged with the Gothic in style, technologies and narratives, embracing the medium’s potential to suggest horror, while occasionally daring to embrace the graphic with developments in effects and visual clarity. In this way the Gothic aspects of television have engaged multiple audiences in different ways. Current television particularly presents a gothicisation of history, informing viewers of the traumas of the past through factual and fictional programming, from Who Do You Think You Are? to Peaky Blinders. As this chapter argues, we can therefore find the Gothic not just in the expected places, but throughout the medium of television.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the notion of peregrinatio in Augustine’s thought, with particular attention given to its use in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. It uses Derrida’s reflections on metaphor to explore the rich regression of images in peregrinatio. Augustine uses the concept, literally denoting the status of a resident alien, to express the affective dynamics of a Christian living away from their home in the heavenly Jerusalem: their sense of misalignment in the world, but also their sense of joy in the very transience of their existence. For no one can be a peregrinus without having a home from which he has traveled, and to which he looks forward to returning. Derrida’s phrase the “destinerrancy of desire” perfectly captures this Augustinian notion.

Living under the Israeli occupation continues to affect all aspects of Palestinians’ everyday lives. This chapter considers the testimonies of Palestinians who were displaced after their homes were damaged during the urbicidal 2002 Israeli Ejtiyah on the old town of Nablus. This analysis is to assess the fundamental role of a sense of place, and the significance of its multiscalar nature, in gaining stability through rebuilding of damaged homes. The Palestinians experience home as a place where sense of place is lived and interpreted in multiscalar forms of spatial justice that relate to everyday life, community and socially constructed meaning, a state of mind, and as they relate to nostalgic memories and fear of displacement. Urban violence not only ruptures the spatial incubator of the Palestinians’ sense of place but also demonstrates the ways in which the colonial power dominance is controlling their homeland in general, and the very place where they intimately nurture it at home. In this context, Palestinians’ relationship with home and sense of place is considered a form of moqawameh (resistance) and sumoud (steadfastness) against the Israeli colonial strategies.

When Seamus Heaney passed away in 2013, there was a remarkable public mourning in Ireland, which merged into a series of reflections on what had been lost. Shortly after, a national poll voted 'Clearances 3' from The Haw Lantern ('When the others were away at Mass') as Ireland’s favourite poem of all time. This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the mourning for Seamus Heaney as a person built upon a series of reflections on loss that had been developing in his poetry since the time of The Haw Lantern. Drawing on manuscript sources, the chapter concludes by focusing on the images of homelessness in Heaney’s poetry that form a counterpoint to the more obvious images of the 'den life' of his childhood home, suggesting that it is possible to see much of his later work as a sustained meditation on homelessness as a condition of being.

Critical responses to the home frequently imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist writing suggest that the domestic is too compromised for a twenty-first-century feminist imaginary. Contemporary feminist dialogues are increasingly alert to the politics of the domestic and its resistance to transformational politics. Yet feminist writing has not relinquished the domestic as a site or language for imagining feminist possibility and practice. If anything, we have seen a proliferation of feminist writing interested in the domestic since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This chapter turns to three literary novels spanning the century so far: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005),Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011), and Miranda July’s First Bad Man(2015). In each novel, the home as literary institution, holiday villa, and single-woman’s house offers a focal point for questions about feminist imagining that gives shape to specific textual strategies, suggesting that if twenty-first-century feminism cannot relinquish the domestic, we must learn to dwell in its compromised politics.

Building on the extensive literature related to postcolonialism and magical realism, this chapter examines how diaspora writing and magical realism are related. It focuses on alienation, the uncanny and mobility, among other elements, demonstrating that these are elements that unite and are common to both modes of writing. It argues that the case of Arab diaspora writing is particularly and uniquely suited to exploring how these modes are related. A close examination of two novels, The Night Counter by Alia Yunis and The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine, illustrates how various forms of place, a central and key dimension of diaspora fiction, are refashioned and complicated through these novels’ engagement with and use of magical realism.

This chapter considers ownership of the family home which is often the most significant asset owned by the parties. Where a couple are not married or in a civil partnership ownership has to be determined through principles of land law and trusts. There are two approaches either a resulting trust or a constructive trust and both are considered in detail although the resulting trust is used far less frequently today in relation to the family home. The resulting trust is based on contributions to the purchase price whereas the constructive trust is based on intention of the parties which can either be implied or express. Where property is owned jointly the court presumes equal ownership of the beneficial interest but this can be rebutted. There is far more flexibility with a constructive trust both in finding intention and also in quantification of the shares but the outcome of cases is far more uncertain particularly where the courts impute the intentions of the parties as to the size of the shares. Rights in the family home can also arise under proprietary estoppel.

The number of transnational corporations (TNCs) – including parent companies and subsidiaries – has exploded over the last forty years. In 1970, there were approximately 7,000 TNCs in the world; today, there are more than 100,000 with over 900,000 foreign affiliates.1 TNCs are now so complex and amorphous in their structure – even compared to ten years ago – that it is difficult for even the most sophisticated legal systems to adequately hold TNCs accountable for the harms they create in countries where they operate, even as the TNCs make enormous profits at the expense of often vulnerable communities. The truth is, certain legal doctrines, often devised nearly a century ago or longer, are too outdated to sufficiently assure that TNCs are held accountable for harms they create in today’s world, where TNCs operate globally, and often have structures that transcend a single country or jurisdiction.

This chapter highlights the impact of the war on women’s private everyday lives and explores how the wartime state increasingly reached into the home. It demonstrates how previously personal issues became political as women were urged to express their patriotism through their careful household management and by maintaining model homes and families for their absent husbands. The chapter also assesses the impact of the war on the standard of living of women in Ireland, interrogating previous interpretations of wartime prosperity and contrasting the urban and rural experiences. It explores the impact of the war on maternal and infant health, and the consequences of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic for women in Ireland. The chapter argues that the war resulted in much greater intervention of the state in women’s everyday and personal lives and brought significant hardship to many women. Far more women became reliant on governmental welfare through separation allowances, pensions and initiatives under the Prince of Wales National Relief Fund. Memoirs, diaries and letters are used to explore the experience of separated couples during the war and how women coped with the emotional hardship of the soldiers’ war service.