Keele Research Repository

This thesis seeks to develop a model for the analysis of rural space as a distinct category, through the integration of several of the disparate schools of thought on the subject of space. From the phenomenological to the postmodern a vacuity has left in the field around the subject of a distinct rurality. By addressing the works of Ivan Turgenev and Thomas Hardy using a three-part thematic sub-division relating rural space to questions of community, identity and nature, I will argue that there are certain thematic points that can provide loci around which an analysis of any literary rural space can be explicated using the correct theoretical framework.
This theoretical framework will integrate the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Lefebvre, whilst also drawing upon sociological and anthropological theories, the works of Gaston Bachelard, and also more recent developments in the fields of Geocriticism and Ecocriticism. This approach will demonstrate that the concept of rurality is governed by the concept of liminality.
The fundamental aim of this study is to make an original and innovative contribution, not only to the field of literary spatial studies, but also directly to the fields of both Turgenev and Hardy scholarship, as, crowded though these fields are, there is much new that can be offered by the approach mapped out in this thesis. The wider applicability of this model to any text concerning rurality provides an exciting opportunity for the thesis to reach beyond itself and generate further research on the subject of literary rurality.