Chronotope

The chronotope (from the Greek for 'time' and 'place') is the essential interconnection of temporal and spatial relations artistically mastered in a literary work — the unity of time and space as a formal-semantic category. The concept was introduced and elaborated in detail by the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who showed that in different genres typical chronotopes take shape — images of time-space (the chronotope of the road, the threshold, the encounter, the castle, the provincial town) that determine the fictional world of a work and the type of hero. The chronotope gives events concreteness and 'condenses' time into visible spatial images. For example, in Lesia Ukrainka's drama The Forest Song a mythopoetic chronotope of the Volhynian forest operates, with the cyclical time of the seasons that embodies the eternal rhythm of nature. The chronotope of the road, of the journey, organizes numerous epic works, and the chronotope of the boundary situation marks modern psychological prose, deepening the philosophical content of what is depicted.