Tereza Topolovská

Explores how physical space is represented and affects the work of two British novelists.Of Spaces and Ideas provides a deeper insight into the work of two contemporary British novelists, Jim Crace and Simon Mawer, with a particular emphasis on spatial sensibility as one of the defining elements of their poetics. Drawing on a range of literary-theoretical approaches to space, the study analyzes selected novels by the two writers to demonstrate the ways in which they render space and place and, above all, the ways in which their spatial representations allow them to express the key ideas behind their stories, namely those of identity, history, and the relationship between an individual and the environment in which they live.

From Howard’s End to Brideshead Revisited, this book explores the leitmotif of the English country house in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, with a focus on the works of E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. Integrating wider social and cultural contexts with contemporary architectural developments, Tereza Topolovská reveals that the variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings that can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture, and poetics of space, the country house—with its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities—accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.