Space and place in the novels of E. M. Forster

Gail Fincham

pp. 38-57

in: Attiede Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Jakob Lothe, Attie de Lange (eds), Literary landscapes, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

Space, understood in its most primitive sense (a distance to be crossed, an openness between points, one of which is occupied by a perceiving subject, filled by something, sunlight, moonlight, hot dust, cold mud or emptiness) seems omnipresent in literature, but rather hard to place. There doesn't seem to be a vocabulary sufficiently capacious to discuss space. You may talk about deictics, copresence, coordination, distances, surfaces, exteriors, interiors, volume and plasticity, but the units of measurement are lacking: literary space, in being conceptual, cannot be measured, but it can be experienced. It is this experience that leads us to claim that space is invariably present in fiction though never precisely so. (Wilson, 1995, p. 215)