"I mourn thee now": nostalgia in John Banville’s novel "The Sea"

ENDevalued throughout modernity, the concept of place has been eventually acknowledged as a complex phenomenon partaking in the lived experience of a human subject. The work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Gaston Bachelard prepared the ground for a further inquiry into the phenomenon of place not only in philosophy, but also in literary theory and criticism, and social sciences. As regards literary theory (cultural semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern theory) and criticism, place was affirmed mostly as some spectral segment of the concept of space (as theorized by Yuri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson etc.) in close alliance with time. It has been only now (for the past few decades) that a distinction between space and place has been made and place has been given an in-depth and comprehensive analysis in the works of the phenomenological thinkers of place like Edward S. Casey, Jeff Malpas, David Carr, Donald A. Landes, and many other powerful voices (Michael Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari etc.) in the scholarly fields inside and outside phenomenology and literary theory. [...].