THE ROLE OF SPACE IN CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CHARLES DICKENS’S DAVID COPPERFIELD AND ION CREANGĂ’S MEMORIES OF MY BOYHOOD)
THE ROLE OF SPACE IN CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CHARLES DICKENS’S DAVID COPPERFIELD AND ION CREANGĂ’S MEMORIES OF MY BOYHOOD)

Summary/Abstract: This article aims at establishing the role of space in the development of child personalities as portrayed by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield and Ion Creangă in Memories of My Boyhood. For this purpose, it will analyze the chronotopes of the city and compare them with the chronotope of an idyllic village, both nineteenth century places. It will also explore the conditions offered by the learning establishments and the impact they had on the development of the characters. Per Gustafson’s three pole model of meanings attributed to place will be applied in the reading of the two nineteenth-century novels with a view to creating images of the interactions between the self, the environment and the others, that is, between the individual, the place and society. Schools have to promote and to encourage creative thinking and also to enable the students to acquire practical knowledge. Consequently, it is important to make an evaluation of the Romanian and English nineteenth-century schools depicted in the two novels in terms of the ability to achieve these requirements. The analysis will also focus on establishing the role of the schools in shaping the students’ personality and contributing to their evolution and transition from childhood to adulthood.

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