Dworzec i katedra. Miasto i architektura w powieściach Chestertona

• Authors: Elmar Schenkel

Title variants

EN

The Station and Cathedral. Town and Architecture in the Prose of Gilbert Keith Chesterton

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

Chesterton was a very visual writer and architecture plays an interesting, though somewhat neglected role in his works. It reflects human strengths and weaknesses as well as religious and political attitudes. Such functions can be seen in The Man Who Was Thursday with its tunnels, labyrinths and secret shelters. Architecture here is meant to protect, but also to dissociate the anarchists from social life. Eccentricities and the return to Nature may also be reflected through architecture, as in The Club of Queer Trades. Or, architecture may be seen as dangerous – a moral temptation – as in the Father Brown story, “The Hammer of God”, where the spire of a church nourishes ideas of the superman in a local priest and turns him into a murderer. This leads to the question of how Chesterton looked at sacred architecture, especially Gothic cathedrals. He discovered his own sense of the fantastic in them (“On Gargoyles”) but also used them in his Christian crusade. His major contribution is that he rediscovered sacred symbolism in railway stations and other secular places but he also studied architecture in everyday life. Thus Chesterton links his architectural thought to his general message: i.e., to rediscover the everyday world as an arena of surprising adventures, in other words, to make life worth living.

Keywords

EN

Comparative literature; Geopoetics; Gilbert Keith Chesterton

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
• Journal: Rocznik Komparatystyczny
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 3
• Pages: p. 255-264

Contributors

author

Elmar Schenkel

• Institut für Anglistik, Universität Leipzig, Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Beethovenstr. 15 04107 Leipzig, Haus 4, Zi. 307