| SUMMARY: |
The present study aims at approaching literature -namely, the British fiction of the past decades- by means of an inquiry into space and spatial representations. While the project in itself may seem formidable by its mere dimensions, it is undertaken with the awareness of the inescapable subjectivity and provisionality of all critical endeavours, which it uses positively, taking it to refer to the combination of creative insight and conceptual background that any investigation of literary productions seems to require. Therefore, my study does not eschew generalisations, but it generalises on the basis of a set of different, and sometimes widely differing, novels, striving to avoid reductionism and to preserve their specificity and the variety of their suggestions, paralleled only by the specificity and variety of the visions on space found at the interpreter’s disposal, and whose interdisciplinarity is both bewildering and exhilarating. After all, the space of postmodernity brings together an unprecedented variety of elements: as it has been pointed out many times, a single, complex plane of immanence compresses elements as varied as the body, textures of everyday life, cities and the phenomenon of globalisation. |
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