Abstract
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, literary theory and criticism turned their focus on representation of space and place, which eventually gained the significance that time and temporality had enjoyed for centuries. This focal shift, insisting that the spatial properties of the narrative should not be restricted to mere background setting, emerged from the acknowledgement that the relationship between human beings and their environment is reciprocal and interactive.
The fact that human beings live in space-time and both of these dimensions considerably determine our existence and are equally crucial for the formation of our identity opened to theorists a fruitful field of interest that culminated in what can be called the postmodern "spatial turn". As a result, a number of often interdisciplinary approaches investigating literary representations of space and place, both real and imaginary ones, have been developed since the late 1970s, enhancing literary studies with findings from other fields such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, ecology and geography, and producing a diversity of such approaches, as can be demonstrated on the examples of geopoetics, ecocriticism, psychogeography, humanistic geography and geocriticism.
Using these critical practices and their theoretical points of departure the lecture focuses on varied spatial representations in selected works of contemporary British fiction writers such as Jim Crace, Simon Mawer, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Ian McGuire.