American Book Review

Marxism is most often associated with historical or even historicist thought, rightly so, and as such it is considered a profoundly temporal discourse. However, following the "spatial turn" in the humanities and social sciences, enhanced attention has been paid to matters of space, place, and mapping, disclosing the degree to which space as well as time are of central importance to Marxist critical theory and practice. Indeed, a Marxist-oriented spatial literary studies establishes a clearer understanding of the dynamic world system of which we are a part, while opening up imaginative spaces for future development.

Marxism has always maintained critical awareness of space and spatial relations, and spatiotemporality is embedded in core concepts of the discourse. Marx and Engels themselves, in The Communist Manifesto (1848), begin by offering a historical account of the rise and spread of capitalist development, and in so doing they highlight its transformations of social space, including burgeoning urbanization, the extension of markets to the global "world market," the rise of communication and transportation technologies, the overturning and reconstructing of hierarchies ("all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned"), and the transmogrification of the inchoate forms or continuous flows of daily life into a series of fungible segments to be distributed across an abstract plane of social relations (e.g., the spatialization of time in the figures of the hourly wage, timetables, and work schedules). For Marx and Engels, the nature of capital itself is imagined in spatial terms as a process and substance that "permeates" spaces until they are all effectively saturated. "It [the bourgeoisie] must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." This "everywhere" at the heart of capitalist social relations is also the core principle of Marxist critique in response, for Marxism insists on confronting those relations in their "totality," as a single system.

In a less abstract sense, the development of a capitalist mode of production relates to and alters physical organizations of social space, human geography [End Page 137] and architecture, for instance. The most famous example is likely the much discussed rise of the city and the shifting relationship between the urban and the rural across various societies. Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973) offers a classic analysis of this phenomenon in British literature and culture, and it paved the way for his Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977). But the migration and concentration of populations from the countryside to the urban centers also involves the radical restructuring of architectural spaces, including new forms of residential, industrial, and commercial buildings, not to mention widened avenues and extensive highways, elevated and subterranean transport systems, ferries, barges, and bridges, and so forth. Additionally, the fashioning and ordering of spaces within or outside of cities reflects and helps to determine aspects of the class struggle, as with the very existence of upper- versus lower-class neighborhoods. The urban planning necessary to build major thoroughfares, railways, parks, and other such spaces is also influenced mightily by political and economic forms, as Walter Benjamin famously explored in his Arcades Project (1982), "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," and elsewhere.

Just as societies and political economies experience profound spatiotemporal transformations, so too do works of culture. Literature undoubtedly reflects and engages with these changing social conditions in innumerable ways, and that would certainly apply to the shifting social spaces and the spatial relations that literary works also register.

It is perhaps not accidental that, for British literature, what is sometimes viewed as the first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), involves a bourgeois individual isolated (literally) on an island, one who eventually encounters and then enslaves a native inhabitant, Friday. It is also notable that, in the story, Robinson Crusoe had been shipwrecked while on a voyage to procure African slaves to work on plantations in Brazil, making the bourgeoisie's relationship to territorial conquest and human bondage a key aspect of the novel itself. Robinson Crusoe focuses especially on the ways in which its eponymous hero masters his space in order to survive and thrive there. Bourgeois individualism, incipient industrialization, colonization and empire, and the proletarianization of subjugated peoples...