Narrative Space

Abstract

The reading of The Great World offered in this book, as an example of practice in literary geography, is the result of one reader’s interaction with a novel. As a whole, the study explores the idea that the literary work can be understood to happen collaboratively in this way, one reader at a time, repeatedly, as each reading generates the event out of multiple contexts and connections. Like place, I have been arguing, fiction happens in space, is the product of interrelations, emerges in the dimension of coexistence, and is always in a state of becoming. Significantly, both the argument and the terms in which I am making that argument are themselves the products of interrelations—this potentially useful place-fiction parallel having originally occurred to me as I was in the process of reading and rereading the work of Doreen Massey. Even the phrasing here—space, interrelations, coexistence, becoming—depends on Massey’s work, and so my reliance on her terms forms an intertextual connection that many literary geographers would recognize immediately. And I borrow this phrasing not just because I think it works well but also to throw a wire across academic distance and acknowledge the impact that Massey’s writings have had on my readings.