Novelists in their autobiographical and imaginative writings illuminate various aspects of the mutual inter- action between man and environment. Early or home place, with its formative and restorative qualities, has at the same time an ambiguity such that it exists in dialectical relationship to subsequent place. In the symbiotic relationship between man and environment, place may be considered as people, and people as place. Time is crucial to the experience of place. WITHIN the field of imaginative literature the writings of the novelist are of particular interest to a geographer exploring the critical concept of place. It is an interest which goes deeper than acknowledging his ability to capture the full flavour of the environment, a quality recently emphasized by Meinig,l for, when the novel replaced the epic and drama as the main literary form in the early eighteenth century, its chief novelty was to add to the ancient portrayal of 'life by values' that of 'life in time', to use Forster's terms.2 Medieval stories had traditionally recounted unchanging moral truths in timeless settings, the plots themselves being freely borrowed between different countries and cultures; now, the novel was time-specific and, thus, by implication, place-specific also. In English literature, to which this review will largely be confined, place specificity took over a century to emerge. It was initially presented in a generalized sense, the main dichotomy being between town and country, with seasons being largely social ones. Sense of the par- ticular, as opposed to the generalized, needed the detailed eye of the Romantics who approached the general by concentrating on the particular. The generalized worlds of Fielding or Richardson thus yielded to the detailed, historical eye of Scott and the subtle etchings of a few southern localities by Jane Austen. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century the novelist's pen began more fully to depict particular localities, thereby giving rise to the genre of the English regional novel.3 The amount and nature of environmental description, literal or symbolic, together with the nature of the relationship to character, has been the basis for recognizing distinctive subsequent phases in the regional novel-picturesque, senti- mental, interpretive, modern.4 It is not proposed here to concentrate on the regional novel per se, for not only are there difficulties in defining and allocating works to this particular genre, but the term implies a particular spatial scale too restrictive for the present theme. Place may refer to a variety of scales, in each of which, in experiential terms, there is a characteristic bounding with internal structure and identity, such that insideness is distinguished from outsideness. At its most obvious and familiar, it is wherever we feel 'at home', where things 'fall into place', beyond which we feel 'out of place', intruders in someone else's domain. We therefore inhabit a hierarchy of places, bringing into play the appropriate level of resolution according to the particular context in which we find ourselves. Each level or state is born of experience of the mutual interaction between man and environment. The aim
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Dec 1, 1983
Andrew Gibb + 1
Open Access