Home Away from Home: The Place of Home in Stephen Herrick’s Verse Novel, A Simple Gift

The notion of home has been explored from a multiplicity of perspectives by sociologists, anthropologists and postcolonialists and the resulting literature demonstrates that it is possible to conceptualise home in a variety of ways. It might be construed, as Hulme (2000) suggests, as 'the "homeland" that has been left behind as well as the place now occupied' (p.3), or as the location in which a dwelling is situated or the space that it occupies, or even the function that it performs. Or it might encompass a city, suburb, house, room or garden, a 'comfortingly bounded enclosed space, defining an "other" who is outside' (p.102) as Read (1996) proposes