ABSTRACT
In “Caves as Anti-Places: Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God,” Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher explore the unique type of space in order to reveal the spatial alterity of caves. They argue that analyzing the literary representation of natural subterranean voids requires a careful re-theorisation of the dynamic relations of space and place. The difficult question of how meaning comes to be attached to a particular space, thus transforming it into place, is central to Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, both of which depict male protagonists who retreat underground, albeit for quite different purposes. According to the standard definition, a cave is a natural cavity beneath the land large enough to admit a human body, but—as the novels selected for this essay show—caves fascinate and terrify us because they confound human assumptions about our role in assigning meaning to the earth’s spaces.
