The Role of Place in Literature

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This book is a groundbreaking study of the uses of metaphors and images of place in literature. Lutwack takes a dynamic view of the relationship between place and the action or thought in a work. Stimulating comparisons over a wide range of works, principally American and British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, illustrate how writers have charged different environments with symbolic and psychological meaning. Lutwack treats conceptions of place as these have been expressed through various, sometimes overlapping, patterns of images: garden and wilderness, farm and forest, earth and body. Tension springs from the conflicting senses that the earth is fallen and corrupt and that it is our natural location in the scheme of things. Twentieth-century concern for the condition of the earth as environment gives rise to a new and powerful sense of placelessness- to a substitution of a sense of motion for the traditional sense of location. This far-reaching exploration will remain a seminal source book for years to come and will serve as a cornerstone for all future works on the topic. The extensive footnotes, incorporating scholarly writing on place in literature, and the detailed index, including the place types discussed in the test, enhance the book's usefulness as a reference tool.