Space

Space is a topic that is both ancient and modern. With the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, space has been transformed from a timeless, formless container in early Western philosophy to a complex place that is constantly being given new meanings. This book first compiles the basic features of modern space, introduces the philosophical and theoretical ideas that have had a great impact on the innovation of the concept of space, and focuses on the significance of the theoretical turn in space since the end of the twentieth century in the context of the study of literary criticism, which has been a guiding significance for the practice of literary criticism. After that, the book selects the intersection of spatial theory with urban studies and feminism, respectively, and combines them with textual studies to exemplify the methods, ideas, and rich results that spatial literary studies may produce. The former takes the urban wanderer as a through-line literary figure, linking Charles Pierre Baudelaire's Paris and James Joyce's Dublin, and focuses on the modern urban experience and its spatial meanings and variants in different contexts. The latter is based on a paired reading of the works of white British female writer Virginia Woolf and black American female writer Zora Neale Hurston, demonstrating the universality and internal differences of feminist claims to the space of women's existence.