Abstrakt
Arcadia (1992), Jim Crace's most distinctively urban novel, bears the idiosyncratic features of its author's writing: it is a deceptively simple story of vague geographical and historical setting conceived as a parable of the current world concerns, it portrays a community in a transitional moment of its existence, and it pays a special emphasis on spatial representations of its fictitious environment which assume metaphorical properties that make them determining for dramatising and conveying the story's ideas. Moreover, as a writer focusing on moral issues and adhering to leftist political outlook, Crace has been consistent in his criticism of the liberal market economy and its negative impacts on communal values, which is also voiced in the novel.
This paper makes use of the theoretical premises of Transmodernism and analytical tools of phenomenologically focused geocriticism in order to demonstrate that Arcadia can be subsumed within the so-called transmodern fiction, and that it carries out its critique of the globalised capitalism through what Eric Prieto terms as entre-deux, or in-between, places. Accordingly, it observes that the novel's liminal and heterogeneous places display non-linear and complexly interrelated temporalities which are indicative of their role within the city's progress.