Home is commonly associated with comfort, safety, and belonging, but it is not a self-evident or universally accessible space. The COVID-19 lockdowns brought such ambivalences of domestic space into sharp relief, prompting a re-evaluation of overly affirmative notions of home and finding literary expression in recent fictions of lockdown. Framed by interdisciplinary research on home as a site of intersectional power relations, the guest lecture will use Sarah Moss’ 2021 novel The Fell as a case study for lockdown fiction’s critical assessment of a politics of home and the exclusions and pressures that come with making a home.

The lecture will show how Moss works through the individual and communal consequences of the COVID-19 lockdowns in Britain by attending to the small practices that structure the four protagonists’ relations to their homes, belongings, and one another. These practices are far from banal. Rather, they reveal dwelling spaces as both the result and expression of concrete, socially situated relations between people, objects, institutions, and environments, all of which are embedded in uneven geometries of power. In guided close readings, the lecture will explore how the literary representation of lockdown domesticity maps onto wider questions of home and homeland, belonging, and exclusion. Ideas of “being at home” may imply national, ethnic, cultural, or familial boundaries that distinguish those who belong from those who are rendered outsiders, e.g. in migration discourses. At the same time, the injunction to stay at home exposes the potential violence of domestic space: for those experiencing coercion or domestic abuse, home may become a site of surveillance, isolation, and imprisonment. Moss’ novel thus illuminates a politics of banality in which home is simultaneously shelter and confinement, intimate space and contested territory, “ours” and never simply ours.