Between the Oneiric House and Heterotopias: Polly Crosby’s The Illustrated Child through Bachelardian and Foucauldian Lenses

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F49777513%3A23420%2F25%3A43976655" target="_blank" >RIV/49777513:23420/25:43976655 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://ojs.cuni.cz/pjes/article/view/5079" target="_blank" >https://ojs.cuni.cz/pjes/article/view/5079</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.14712/23362685.5079" target="_blank" >10.14712/23362685.5079</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Between the Oneiric House and Heterotopias: Polly Crosby’s The Illustrated Child through Bachelardian and Foucauldian Lenses

Original language description

The present reflections on the treatment of place and space in the debut novel by a contemporary English author, Polly Crosby (b. 1980), The Illustrated Child (2020), are mostly inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis, mentioned in his Poetics of Space, which ascribes the house a crucial role in the life of a child. The combination of the youthful protagonist and the setting of the novel, Braër, an old solitary farmhouse amid the Suffolk countryside, provides fertile ground for the consideration of multiple phenomenological notions of this French philosopher, who has recently become of interest again to artists, architects and academics. In addition to the house itself, special attention is paid to his conception of the attic and of the casket in confrontation with how they are presented in the novel. This initial kinship of the setting with Bachelard’s writing is further reinforced by the significance ofwater in the narrative, which resonates well with his treatment of the imagination of matter, namely in his book Water and Dreams. In the latter part of this paper, the focus shifts to the novel’s specific secondary locations tracing the protagonist’s rare but significant journeys from the intimacy of home to the outside world. These destinations, among which the most important are the circus and the nursing home, recall and off er confrontation with the concept of heterotopias introduced by Michel Foucault in his seminal essay “Of Other Spaces”.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60205 - Literary theory

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Prague Journal of English Studies

ISSN

1804-8722

e-ISSN

2336-2685

Volume of the periodical

14

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1-2

Country of publishing house

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Number of pages

15

Pages from-to

73-87

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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