Abstract (eng)
My paper aims to investigate the structure, origins, and development of the metaphor of
coming back home to god through the 19th
– 21th
centuries. This includes the broad variety
of its manifestations in literature, music, cinema and arts; analyzing spiritual & country
music, Victorian “consolation literature” and its contemporary continuators, I take out
“domesticated” representations of paradise and investigate them in their different cultural
and social conditions.
Analyzing the metaphor, I distinguish between two levels of representation: home viewed
as the sacred lost place, and – based on it – paradise, seen through the perspective of the
ideal home. I hypothesize that, the “discovery” of childhood and the establishment of the
new bourgeois way of life and culture in the first half of the 19th
century led to the
idealization of home as a place of innocence and comfort, positioning it thus within the
imagery and symbolism of paradise.
Finally, I investigate the cases of the ironic reading of the homecoming metaphor,
characteristic of the 20th
century, when it remains to function as a symbol for death and
dying, but loses the idea of going to paradise after it, presuming a real death ins tead of a
pleasant “homecoming.”