ABSTRACT

Michel Foucault, in a brief essay published in 1984, announced that space, rather than time, was already emerging as a (perhaps the) primary category for critical analysis.1 Time, the domain of narrative, had been the dominant trope and therefore category of analysis in the teleologically haunted representations of Western modernity. But space, Foucault pointed out, had also lost its sacred character with Galileo, though we perhaps had not realized it; the present era, he thought, should undertake the continuing project of its demystification. This chapter will serve three purposes: it will offer a brief survey of influential trends in the spatial turn in literature in English and cultural studies; it will sketch a historical overview of narratives of gender and sexual possibility in relation to the concept of the city, especially in modernity; and finally, it will offer some brief exemplary readings of the way those narratives have played out in literature, film, and television in late modernity.