"Barring such illnesses as claustrophobia or agoraphobia or situations such as medical isolation or incarceration, most people move naturally from smaller to larger spaces and back again without giving the process much thought. But paying attention to our own movement in space yields all sorts of sensory experiences from something relaxing to something else terrifying or even astonishingly beautiful. Our sense of expandable/contractible space can influence how we process everything from Japanese gardens to mountain hikes and desert expanses. Writers often expand or contract spaces around their characters for dramatic effect, character building, and even thematic purposes. Marie de France used expanded spaces for adventure and travel and contracted spacesfirst for romance, and then for spiritual devotion. Chaucer used expanded spaces for adventure, pilgrimage, and danger and contracted spaces for conviviality and storytelling. Dante and Milton created expansive cosmologies but focused on small spaces forboth suffering and incredible spiritual achievement. Study of literary spatiality yields fascinating results reflecting useful techniques for reading writing and reminds us of the value of all sorts of different approaches to analysis and artistic enjoyment."--
Barring such illnesses as claustrophobia or agoraphobia, or situations such as medical isolation or incarceration, most people move naturally from smaller to larger spaces and back again without giving the process much thought. But paying attention to our own movement in space yields all sorts of sensory experiences from something relaxing to something terrifying or even astonishingly beautiful. Our sense of expandable/contractible space can influence how we process everything from Japanese gardens to mountain hikes and desert expanses.
Writers often expand or contract spaces around their characters for dramatic effect, character building, and even thematic purposes. Marie de France used expanded spaces for adventure and travel and contracted spaces first for romance, and then for spiritual devotion. Chaucer used expanded spaces for adventure, pilgrimage, and danger and contracted spaces for conviviality and storytelling. Dante and Milton created expansive cosmologies but focused on small spaces for both suffering and incredible spiritual achievement. This study of literary spatiality yields fascinating results, reflects useful techniques for reading, and reminds us of the value of all sorts of different approaches to analysis and artistic enjoyment.
Table of Contents
Preface: Some Thoughts on Ways of Knowing and Seeing
1.Some Ideas on Expandable/Contractible Space in Literary Contexts
2.Maries Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space
3.Place and the Contraction/Expansion of Space in Dantes Commedia
4.Expandable/Contractible Space in the Canterbury Tales: Some Theoretical
Measures from Beyond the French Fringe
5.Boundaries, Virtue, and a Spatiality of Romance: Love, Adventure, and
Magic in The Faerie Queene, Le Morte Darthur, and Sir Gawain the Green
Knight
6.Shakespeares Henry V: The Stage as Space, Place, and Mind
7.Paradise Lost and the Physical/Spiritual Implications of
Expandable/Contractible Space
8.Popes The Rape of the Lock and the Expandable/Contractible Space of
Upper-Class Satire
9.Tolkien and Spatiality: What Expandable and Contractible Space Suggests
in The Lord of the Rings
10.Horizontal and Vertical Space and the Renaissance Mind
Bibliography
Index
E.L. Risden, emeritus professor of English at St. Norbert College, lives in De Pere, Wisconsin, where he continues to write literary and movie scholarship, speculative fiction, and occasional poetry.
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