The poetics of space

Paperback; xxxv + 241 pp. Translation of "La poétique de l'espace" (1958). From the back cover: "Bachelard, considered by many to be the father of the French new critics, explores the philosophical significance of the various kinds of space that attract and concentrate the poetic imagination. He examines spaces of intimacy and immensity—rooms, forests, shells, corners, closets—and seeks to determine how the poetic image is apprehended not by psychology or rationalism, but by recourse to a pure phenomenology that considers the onset of an image in individual consciousness. This requires us to go beyond our experience in time to attain the level of daydreams, where time ceases to quicken memory and space is everything." Contents: Foreward / Etienne Gilson Introduction 1. The House. From cellar to garret. Significance of the hut 2. House and universe 3. Drawers, chests and wardrobes 4. Nests 5. Shells 6. Corners 7. Miniature 8. Intimate immensity 9. The Dialectics of outside and inside 10. The Phenomenology of roundness