Christopher Meredith

The poetic world of the Song of Songs is a famously heady and distortive landscape, filled with bright sunlit rills, nocturnal cityscapes, and fecund bodies laid out like kingdoms. But what does the Song's use and abuse of spatial relationships tell us about its subject matter, and what do its strange panoramas tell us about literary space more broadly? Directly challenging recent methodological trends in biblical spatial studies, Journeys in the Songscape uses a range of innovative critical tools to explore, map and critique poetic space in the Song of Songs. Taking the reader on a series of journeys across the Song's gendered, rural, urban and bodily spaces, Meredith argues that the worlds that spring up between the Song's lovers are all subtle reimaginings of the space between the biblical page and its own readers, and that at the heart of the Song is a (con)fusion of the dynamics of loving with the experience of reading. Love is at work in the Song, says Meredith, but it is not its subject so much as a sign under which collusions of power, textuality, space and subjectivity labour. The Song's world speaks not only to sexual relationships, then, but to the structure of language itself; textual spaces do not organize textual meaning but rather image its fundamental instability. Journeys in the Songscape is a bold new literary treatment of the Song of Songs, but it is also a rethinking of what we mean by the term 'literary space', and represents a playful incitement to reconsider how critical tools are put to use in apprehending space as a literary construct.

Space and the Song of Songs

Journeys in the Songscape

Mihangel Morgan

This novel tells the story of the dull life of unemployed academic Dr. Jones and how it changes forever when he sees a young man naked on a building top, threatening to jump to his death. Persuaded to descend, the stranger is befriended by Jones. The stranger, named Melog, explains that he has been exiled from Laxaria, a country colonized by Sacria, which has banned the Laxarian language and destroyed its culture. He has come to Wales in search of a lost Laxarian manuscript, the Imalic, the only surviving copy of his country's legends. Drawing on themes related to cats, noncommunication, and political oppression, this tender story of friendship is a satire of the purpose and intent that dominate people's lives.

Melog

Wil Daniel wonders what he has done with his life as he sits in the outpatient department of the local hospital; a chance encounter with an old flame sparks an affair that reveals far more about their lives, past and present, than just bare skin and desire. In this tale of childhood friendship and the complications of adulthood, Wil's story and those of other male friends of narrator Dean Lloyd are reflected and echoed, exploring the ways in which individuals keep or fail to keep control of the course of their lives. Compelling and unpredictable, this novel is at once serious and blackly comic: a veritable tour de force of character revelation through dialogue.

Christopher Meredith

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