Spaces of Desire Spaces of Transition: Space and Emotions in Modern Literature

In the last decade, the so called «spatial turn» has produced a broad discussion of space and spatiality in the social sciences, in architecture and art, as well as in philosophy, and also in literary criticism. The book focuses on one aspect largely ignored by literary historians as well as by theorists/historians of space, that is, the constitutive interrelationship of space and emotions. Departing from a dynamic concept of space as the result of human activities and perceptions, combined with the phenomenological concept of space possessing a specific atmosphere, we wish to initiate a discussion of the specific emotional and atmospheric qualities of «heterotopias» in the Foucaultian sense, or « non-lieux » as described by Marc Augé.

Gertrud Lehnert is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam (Germany). Her research focuses on space, emotion, visual culture, gender studies, the history of women’s poetry, and the theory and history of fashion.
Stephanie Siewert (MA) is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam, and a fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Her project focuses on spaces of detention in literature and the visual arts in the 20th and 21st centuries.