Abstract
Jim Crace's novels can be characterised by two interlinked, idiosyncratic features: first, due to their author's remarkable spatial sensibility, there is a distinctive imaginative rendering of various landscapes and cityscapes, and second, there is a theme of communities in transition, that is, groups of people who find themselves on the threshold of a new - historical, social, economic, political - developmental phase. While the former has earned his fictitious milieus the "Craceland" label among critics, the latter has allowed him to explore the impacts of such transitional moments on selected individuals in these communities.
Arcadia (1992), his third novel, set in an unnamed present-day city, is an urban story with a strong pastoral undertone in which the actual places and spaces where its action occurs assume roles that by far transcend that of a mere setting. It also focuses on a transitional period which, once and for all, changes the layout and climate of the city's centre.
It additionally evinces multidirectional temporality by making its determining spatial and architectural concepts metaphorically encompass within themselves, though by different means and to different ends, the present, the past and the future. By using primarily Eric Prieto's phenomenological geocritical approach, this paper will attempt to analyse how Crace's Arcadia renders the inherent spatio-temporal fluidity and volatility of our current globalised world within both individual and collective experience.