Bakhtin Revisited

Mikael Bakhtin was interested in time and space as the most essential coordinates in life and literature. In the latter, chronotopes denote the interaction of time and space in the representation of human experience. This is also what the present study is concerned with. The method used is a creative and free application of Bakhtin‘s idea of the significance of spatio-temporal relationships in literature. The selection of exemplary primary texts for discussion is meant to demonstrate both the validity of the concept and the complexity of actual artistic representations in modernist/postmodernist/postcolonial literature. The monograph offers six case studies in identity construction through time and place - in texts by Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee and Colin Thubron. The types of texts included are essay, fiction and travelogue. The study fuses the methods of British Literary and Cultural Studies. The result is a poetics and politics of time and place/space. Emerging from all these reflections are penetrating insights into the nature of the representation and critical assessment of reality, culture and values.