ABSTRACT

This collection of essays offers a series of reflections on the specific literary and cultural forms that can be seen as the product of modernity’s spatial transformations, which have taken on new urgency in today’s world of ever increasing mobility and global networks. The book offers a broad perspective on the narrative and poetic dimensions of the modern discourses and imaginaries that have shaped our current geographical sensibilities. In the early twenty-first century, we are still grappling with the spatial effects of ‘early’ and ‘high’ modern developments, and the contemporary crises revolving around political boundaries and geopolitical orders in many parts of the world have intensified spatial anxieties. They call for a sustained analysis of individual perceptions, cultural constructions and political implications of spatial processes, movements and relations.

The contributors of this book focus both on the spatial orders of modernity and on the various dynamic processes that have shaped our engagement with modern space.

chapter |24 pages

Framing the Debate

Spatial Modernities, Travelling Narratives

part I|60 pages

Mapping Modernity

chapter 1|15 pages

In the Suburbs of Amaurotum

Fantasy, Utopia and Literary Cartography *

chapter 2|15 pages

Mapping Utopia

part II|52 pages

Island Spaces

chapter 5|16 pages

Crossing the Sand

The Arrival on the Desert Island

chapter 6|16 pages

Two Centuries of Spatial ‘Island’ Assumptions

The Swiss Family Robinson and the Robinson Crusoe Legacy *

chapter 7|18 pages

Island Stills and Island Movements

Un/freezing the Island in 1920s and 1930s Hollywood Cinema

part III|24 pages

Shorelines/Borderlines

chapter 8|11 pages

Words and Images of Flight

Representations of the Seashore in the Texts about the Overseas Flight of Estonians during the Autumn of 1944

chapter 9|11 pages

The Literary Channel

Identity and Liminal Space in Island Fictions

part IV|32 pages

Modernity on the Move

chapter 10|13 pages

Montaigne

Travel and Travail

chapter 11|17 pages

The Expanding Space of the Train Carriage

A Phenomenological Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification

part V|31 pages

Late Modernity and the Spatialized Self

chapter 12|13 pages

The Reader, the Writer, the Text

Traversing Spaces in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes

chapter 13|16 pages

Narrative, Space and Autobiographical Film in the Digital Age

An Analysis of The Beaches of Agnès (2008)