The Literary Beach

History and Aesthetics of a Modern Topos

Carsten Meiner, Katrine Helene Andersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032526737
• eBook ISBN: 9781040014134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As a geo-historical place, the beach integrates a variety of characteristics and functions so multiple that they tend to contradict each other. The beach is both a place of work and trade but also of leisure; it is both a place of therapy and health but also of migration, war, and death; it is a place of mass tourism and boredom but also the place of experiencing the Other; it is a public place but also an uncivilized and desolate place.

This book studies the literary representation of the beach from ancient Greek literature up until today, drawing on English, French, Italian, American, and Spanish literatures from various periods and genres and presenting multiple ways of comparing and understanding literary beaches as a ubiquitous literary phenomenon. It demonstrates how the literary beach as a both geo-historical place and as an aesthetic literary commonplace has been a constant and privileged resource for the analysis of more general existential, sociological, and moral problems. This is the case when for instance the Tahitian beach becomes the place of the "already modern" in Stevenson's tales, or when the Italian beach becomes a question of modern feminism in Ferrante.

In this sense, literature expands the local or national beach by articulating its transnational complexities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: the literary beach – history and aesthetics of a modern topos
• 2 Topologies of the beach
• 3 The already modern beach: Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales
• 4 The beach and the modern Norwegian novel
• 5 Between topos and heterotopia: literary representations of the Spanish beach in works by Carmen Laforet and Juan Goytisolo
• 6 Sous la plage, les pavés! The beach between Utopia and Dystopia in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
• 7 One place, two topoi: the beach in ancient Greek literature
• 8 Cheapness, predictability, and cliché: beaches in nineteenth-century British periodicals
• 9 Words on the beach: riddles of the unpainted shore and the wrapped coast
• 10 The topological poetics of the beach in Marguerite Duras’ L’Amour and L’Été 80
• 11 The birth of a beach worm: the beach as a catalyst for memories and reflections on female identity in Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter
• Index