Home and being away from home have been constant preoccupations in literature over the ages. The old English literary works portrayed warriors and seafarers who were involved in adventurous feats. The old English poem ‘The Wanderer’, written by one of the earliest English Poets Cynwulf embodies the old English spirit for travel and adventure. Medieval literature was characterized by the spirit of romance and chivalry, according to which the Knights set out on quests and engaged in mock encounters. In the Elizabethan and Neoclassical periods, this remained a recurrent theme but with deeper sociological and intellectual associations. The Romantic novelists like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte too engaged this binary: the home as a private space and the society as a public space. Meanwhile, the poets of the period presented this theme from a different paradigm. Quite characteristic of their age, the Victorians too were perplexed by this question. This paper proposes to analyze how the notion of being away from home or moving away from home has been dealt with in different genres over the ages in English literature. The old English or the Anglo Saxon literature abounds with poems that are written with the theme of travelling or wandering from place to place. The Anglo Saxons were a fierce wandering tribe and their literature also embodies this spirit of adventure. ‘The SeaFarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’ are poems that express this spirit of adventurous travel. The Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf presents the royal palace as a place that offers protection to the subjects. The monster in the poem Beowulf may be an external enemy and Beowulf who embarks on this “monster” is valorized as a national hero. Thus, in Anglo Saxon literature, this movement away from the security of the palace is treated as an adventurous deed. Similar was the medieval chivalric notions. Those warriors who moved out of their palace with altruistic missions were honored with Knighthood and they won the respect and love of people. During the Elizabethan age, the theme of moving away from home was a topic both in plays and travel writings. In travel writings, the concept of moving away from home sprang from its sociological context while the Elizabethan dramatists engaged this topic from a philosophic and intellectual perspective. The Elizabethan literature could be seen as an offspring of English Renaissance. Travelers, merchants and explorers left their home country in search of greener pastures. Some of these travelers wrote about their voyages and they were read with great enthusiasm and amazement. Richard Haklyut, Samuel Purchas and Walter Raleigh are some among these travelogue writers. Their writings valorized this movement away from home and home country in the light of the colonial aspirations. The Elizabethan dramatists, however, presented this topic from more of a philosophic and intellectual perspective. The Elizabethan drama was an offspring of both Renaissance and Reformation. Renaissance marked the birth of humanism which resulted in a paradigm shift from a God-centered universe to an anthropocentric universe. This resulted in an explosion of knowledge in secular subjects as different from the medieval times. The society and its religious structures were skeptical of this new learning. The home was a symbol of this old order, which was built on questions of faith and superstitions. The new learning was often associated with universities, especially Wittenberg where the high priest of Reformation Martin Lu