J.E. Malpas explores "Proust's Principle" of "the place-bound identity of persons" in this academic and philosophical study of the connections between humans and human culture on the one hand, and place and space on the other. As humans are physical beings, he argues that "place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience," and he draws upon multiple disciplines and genres, in his exploration of the idea...

Here is another book, much like John Wylie's 2007 Landscape, that I might never have picked up, had I not been writing a paper for my children's literature masters, on the use and significance of place and landscape in two children's novels - Eilís Dillon's The Island of Ghosts and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Malpas' book is definitely outside of the areas of study with which I normally concern myself, and it didn't end up being that germane to my work, as I decided to use the topos idea, found in Jane Suzanne Carroll's Landscape in Children's Literature, in the aforementioned paper. That said, I did find it interesting, if for no other reason than it made me think about place and space in ways I had not hitherto. I have not read a number of the philosophers the author quotes, but that did not detract from the sense of Malpas' argument in any significant way. This is a rather specialized book, and probably will not have much interest outside of certain academic circles. Recommended largely to those readers interested in the academic study of the idea of place. ( )