THE CONCEPT OF PLACE IN LITERARY STUDIES

This paper intends to reveal and analyze how versatile the concept of place may be in the context of literary studies. Place contains both spatiality and temporality, it is a meaningful and concrete instance of the more abstract space and it displays layers of time and thus memory. Awarding sense to a place may happen through storytelling and, from this point of view, it is highly enlightening to look at how progress made in human geography and other traditionally spatial disciplines may be used in analyzing literature. The research conducted focuses mainly of meaningful places belonging to the city of Oslo as depicted and created in the fiction of contemporary Norwegian writer Lars Saabye Christensen.