Spatial Modernities

<p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. They creatively engage in a dialogue between literature, cinema, art history, geography, architecture, cultural semiotics and political science, and they transform twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory and philosophy to examine the textual forms of different spatial modernities. The chapters do not only engage with the cartographies, crossings and displacements represented <i>within </i>different texts and media, but are also attentive to the ways in which the latter produce space and perform mobility. Tracing an arc from Thomas More’s <i>Utopia </i>to the digital spatiality of contemporary autobiographical film, they treat texts as active cultural forces that crystallize, reinforce, interrogate or complicate the spatial imaginaries of modernity through their own narrative and poetic form. </p> <p></p><p><em>List of Figures</em></p><p></p><p><em>Acknowledgements</em></p><p></p><p><b>Framing the Debate: Spatial Modernities, Travelling Narratives </b></p><p></p><p>JOHANNES RIQUET</p><p></p><p>PART I</p><p></p><p>Mapping Modernity </p><p></p><p><b>1</b> <b>In the Suburbs of Amaurotum: Fantasy, Utopia and Literary Cartography</b></p><p></p><p>ROBERT T. TALLY JR. </p><p>2 Mapping Utopia</p><p></p><p>CHRISTINA LJUNGBERG </p><p></p><p><b>3 Of the Novelty of Bird’s-Eye Views in Eighteenth-Century Travelling Narratives</b></p><p></p><p>JEAN-PAUL FORSTER</p><p>4 Satellite Vision and Geographical Imagination</p><p></p><p>DAVID SHIM</p><p></p><p>PART II</p><p></p><p>Island Spaces</p><p></p><p><b>5 </b><b>Crossing the Sand: The Arrival on the Desert Island</b></p><p></p><p>BARNEY SAMSON</p><p></p><p><b>6</b> <b>Two Centuries of Spatial ‘Island’ Assumptions: <i>The Swiss Family Robinson</i> and the <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> Legacy</b></p><p></p><p>BRITTA HARTMANN</p><p></p><p><b>7 </b><b>Island Stills and Island Movements: Un/freezing the Island in 1920s and 1930s Hollywood Cinema</b></p><p></p><p>JOHANNES RIQUET</p><p></p><p><b>PART III</b></p><p></p><p><b>Shorelines/Borderlines</b></p><p></p><p><b>8</b> <b>Words and Images of Flight: Representations of the Seashore in the Texts about the Overseas Flight of Estonians during the Autumn of 1944</b></p><p></p><p>MAARJA OJAMAA</p><p></p><p><b>9 The Literary Channel: Identity and Liminal Space in Island Fictions</b></p><p></p><p>INA HABERMANN</p><p></p><p>PART IV</p><p></p><p>Modernity on the Move</p><p></p><p><b>10</b> <b>Montaigne: Travel and Travail</b></p><p></p><p>TOM CONLEY</p><p></p><p><b>11 The Expanding Space of the Train Carriage: A phenomenological reading of Michel Butor’s <i>La modification</i></b></p><p></p><p>CAROLINE RABOURDIN</p><p></p><p>PART V</p><p></p><p>Late Modernity and the Spatialized Self</p><p></p><p><b>12</b> <b>The Reader, the Writer, the Text: Traversing Spaces in Frank McCourt’s <i>Angela’s Ashes</i></b></p><p></p><p>ELIZABETH KOLLMANN</p><p></p><p><b>13</b> <b>Narrative, Space and Autobiographical Film in the Digital Age: An Analysis of <i>The Beaches of Agnès</i> (2008)</b></p><p></p><p>DEIRDRE RUSSELL</p><p></p><p><i>Notes on Contributors</i></p><p></p><p>Index</p>