The Literary Beach: History and Aesthetics of a Modern Topos (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1032526742 ISBN 13: 9781032526744

Publisher: Routledge, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Carsten Meiner is Professor of French at the University of Copenhagen.

Katrine Helene Andersen is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032526742
• ISBN 13: 9781032526744
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186
• Editor: Meiner Carsten, Andersen Katrine Helene