Spatial Change in English Literature

Joachim Frenk (Ed.)

Spatial Change in English Literature

ISBN 978-3-88476-401-5, ISBN 3-88476-401-2, 230 S., kt., € 22,00 (2000)

A spatial turn which has been going on in the humanities for the last three decades is increasingly gaining in the field of English studies. At a time when 'virtual spaces' call into question widely accepted notions about the 'space of reality,' the question how cultures have made space thinkable becomes crucial. The essays in this volume focus on the ways in which spaces have been constantly reconstructed in English literature. They emphasise the dialectics of spatial and temporal matrices in texts whose rhetorical strategies alternately define and transgress spatial boundaries – boundaries which often only become visible at the liminal moment of change. The spatial changes discussed range from labyrinths in Chaucer and Spenser to desensitised bodies of car passengers in Graham Swift, from seventeenth-century debates about urban and microscopic spaces to the cognitive and intertextual mapping in postmodern travel texts. The contrasting and complementary spatial economies in and between these different texts open up views on a poetics of spatial change in English literature.