_Domestic_ derives from the Latin _domus_ (house) through the Middle French _domestique_. The _OED_’s earliest usages are in sixteenth century, by which time the word already had multiple meanings: quasi-familial intimacy, as in the 1521 supplication “make hym domestique / Within the heuyns,” but also homegrown rather than foreign. While _domestic_ always implied closeness, the extent of the sphere of proximity varied. That sphere might be the individual (Norris’s 1707 _Treatise on Humility_ defines _domestic ignorance_ as “the ignorance of... what passes within our own breast” [_OED_]); the household, as in _domestics_ meaning “servants”; the nation, as in _domestic policy_; or humankind generally, since _domestic animal_ includes livestock in other countries and eras. What the domestic excludes—wild animals, strangers, foreigners—partakes of the alien, a binary enabling hierarchy, conflict, and exploitation. In children’s literature, _domestic fiction_ denotes a genre emerging in the eighteenth century—namely, realistic stories of family life. It may be blended with other genres, including the historical novel and the animal story, but classically it examines a contemporary household, perhaps with neighbors who, in the sixteenth-century sense of the term, become “domestic” within the principal family. Etymologically, the domestic tale is the opposite of the adventure, a category derived...