The next BCLA Research Seminar will take place on Thursday, 22 October 2026, at 2-3pm. It will be held online and everyone’s warmly welcome!

To join, click here: https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/97642083271

Speaker: Professor Richard Hibbitt (University of Leeds)

Title: Global Colour: Literary Space and the Achronotope

Abstract: This presentation will introduce the rationale behind a forthcoming book project that explores literature where references to place are either reduced or completely removed, ranging from Symbolist novels of the 1890s, through works of modernism and the nouveau roman, to postmodernist fiction up the present day. Building on the relational pairs of particular/general and local/global, it proposes ‘global colour’ as a counterpart to the concept of local colour, be it urban or provincial. Global colour manifests in different ways, from the anonymity of urban environments to the depiction of the natural world. These examples are considered as achronotopes that provide a variation on Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the chronotope as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’. To what extent is it possible to write novels that attempt a global representation of the human condition, unmoored from the specificities of belonging? And does fiction that removes markers of place invariably assume a utopian or Eurocentric dimension?

If you have any questions, please get in touch with the organiser: Joanna Rzepa (joanna.rzepa@essex.ac.uk)