British Modernist Fiction and Spatiality

FAIN: FT-270878-20

Sreenjaya Ria Banerjee
CUNY Research Foundation, Stella and Charles Guttman Community College (New York, NY 10018-2602)

Research and writing of the conclusion for a book on metaphors of spatiality in modernist fiction, looking at the work of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot’s discussions of “space and place.”

I am applying for an NEH Summer Stipend to support full time work over July-August 2020 to complete my book, Drafty Houses: Modernist Fiction and Spatiality. This book project grew out of dissertation research and has matured substantially in the last five years as I have presented sections of my argument in competitive academic venues. With NEH support, I will complete revisions and submit the manuscript to the three academic presses currently interested in the project based on my proposal (completed Summer 2018). Drafty Houses considers literary setting to be of primary importance, and studies how three well-known authors used descriptions of space and place in their works to “talk back” to larger debates about modern social organization and nationhood.