Space in Literature: Method, Genre, Topos

Description

This study focuses on the problem of spatiality in literature. Evoking a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the book demonstrates that the analysis of the spatial aspect of the literary text encompasses a variety of textual elements and structures. Organized around three defining problems - spatial topoi, genres and methods - the study gives the reader a good insight into contemporary research on the intersection of space and literature. The topics covered in this book range from the symbolism of different topoi, spatial modelling in literary genres to the spatial form of textual materiality. The individual chapters address the problem of literary space in poetry, drama and fiction. Cover Copyright information Contents Literary Spatialities: Method, Genre, Topos Works cited Notes on Contributors Part 1 Spatial Concepts and Methods On Literary Space: Some Preliminaries Spaces of Metatheoretical Interpretation: A Rapprochement between Linguistic and Literary Approaches in Text Studies? 1 Introduction 2 The SMI defined 3 What cognitivism is not 4 Record of convergence 5 Conclusion Narrative Spaces in Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps 1 Introduction 2 Theoretical overview 3 Reading 4 Conclusion The World Diagrammatised: Multimodal Narration in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon and The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen Intertextual Reorganisation of Space in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty Speculative Cartographies and Contemporary Poetry 1 Introduction: Delirium 2 The cartographer and the rastaman 3 OOO: Ontography and onto-cartography 4 Cognitive mappings 5 Maps of the body and maps of subjectivity 6 Conclusion: Post-representational literary cartographies The Irish Stage: Space and Communication in Printed Drama Ontological Rupture in Caryl Churchill’s Traps 1 An impossible object 2 Discontinuity 3 Self-referentiality 4 Conclusion Part 2 Space in Literature: Genre A Plunge into Space: Spatial Variations in 19th-Century British Utopias Spaces of History in the Dystopian Worlds of Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man and The Inner House Principles of Space Organisation in Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder 1 Temporal layering of space 2 Spatial multiplication and adjacency modification 3 Spatio-temporal subterfuge Mimetic Place and Metamorphic Space: The Conventions of Romance in Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary 1 Place, space, and the historical romance 2 Mimesis with a thesis 3 Symbolic spaces 4 Metamorphoses 5 Beyond mimesis Part 3 Space in Literature: Topos Weaving the House of Fiction: Spatial Poetics in Shirley Jackson’s The Lovely House The Space of Death in Selected Short Stories by Marek S. Huberath 1 Introduction 2 An overview of the stories 3 Death as a journey away from home and from open to enclosed space 4 A bleak view of death 5 The up/down and openness/confinement oppositions: continuing the journey beyond the grave 6 “The Causeway” and “Balm”: paths to heaven and hell 7 Conclusion The Swimming Pool as a Modern Embodiment of the Ancient Topos of Water What Lies Behind? The Topos of the Underground in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 1 Introduction 2 Construction of the underground 3 The underground: place or non-place? 4 Subterranean heterotopias 5 Realms beneath as fictional alternatives to the postmodern city 6 Conclusion List of Figures