This dissertation examines the reformulation of home-spaces in recent novels by Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler. My work conceives of home as an active, dynamic space where multiple ideologies, imaginations and material realities engage one another. Because women have historically been controlled and condemned by the tyrannies of domestic space and of racial and gendered constructions, women writers have turned to exile as a site of freedom. Against the conventions of domestic space, Atwood, Morrison and Butler construct home in an ethics that creates and practices amorphous, inclusive, and changing community.; These three North American writers use the idea of home in different ways, yet each begins in exile and moves toward home. These writers locate exile as a space from which to imagine home and to create a new ethics. Butler plays with ideas of utopia and dystopia in her Parable series, exposing the power of imagination to provide viable home-spaces through the space created by community. In Morrison's Paradise, movement and difference enable individuals to practice a home based in community rather than in conformity. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood investigates the possibility that we are already exiled because we have destroyed both imagination and community leaving us with the hope that we still have enough imagination to respond to aesthetic pleasure and invent ethical practices. Ultimately, the new home-space that these writers construct is mobile and internal, rather than static and external; intentional and active rather than passive; based in memory and an imagined future rather than nostalgia for an imagined past. The novels I examine create an ethics of home that compels us to engage in honest, conscious exchange as we practice home.
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