Walking Towards the Past: Loss and Place in Jane Urquhart's AMap of Glass

Abstract

In this paper I examine the notions of lossand placein relation to the mourning of our personal and historical pasts.2 In doing so, I draw upon the psychoanalytical writings of Julia Kristeva in an analysis of Jane Urquhart's 2005 novel AMap of Glass. Iread AMap of Glassin the winter of 2006, just after having submitted the final draft of my dissertation to my examination committee for oral defense. My doctoral dissertation investigated Kristevan psychoanalytical and literary theory and how the processes of separation, loss and idealization are connected to "lost nature"—and how, in Kristevan thought, nature is ahistorical past. Thus, as I read the novel I was particularly interested in how the themes of loss and mourning areexplored in Urquhart'stext.