Time’s Compass: The Production of Place in Brideshead Revisited'

Abstract

My paper discusses the production of place in Brideshead Revisited in two related ways: both how the way the makers of the programme constructed a rhetoric of place, and secondly, how the protagonist Charles Ryder as a narrator and a painter articulates time through geography, offering an impression not so much of 'time’s arrow', but of time’s compass: a sense of how time is embodied in buildings and other sites and how going to one place or another may be to imagine oneself moving backwards or forwards in time, or, indeed, both at once.