Place and space in modern fiction

Abstract

Wesley A. Kort mines and organizes the contribution of six modern English writers to our understanding of human relations to places and the moral and spiritual importance of these relations. Hardy, Conrad, Forster, Graham Green, Golding, and Spark deploy fictions depicting the deficient attitudes toward place and space that are characteristic of modern culture, and they narrate more positive alternatives. Kort illuminates and develops the spatial theory implicit in their work and sets it in the context of contemporary theories of human-place relations and spatiality. Emphasizing the force and significance of place and location in narrative discourse, Kort counters the assumption that modern writers responded to the traumatic dislocations of modernity by creating fictions that are somehow outside the history of those dislocations. He also takes account of an important shift in cultural studies from the language of time and history to the language of place and space, a shift that helps distinguish the modern period from the late-modern and postmodern periods. At the same time, he avoids the vague characteristics of spatial language in cultural studies.