Real and Imaginary Spaces in Tom Stoppard’s Plays

This study benefits from the terminology of geocriticism – a literary criticism that suggests an interdisciplinary approach to the exploration of literature in relation to space and place, and refers to the spatial theories of Lefebvre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Augé, and Certeau as well as to Issacharoff’s study of ‘dramatic space’. Proposing a multidisciplinary perspective, this study analyzes the mimetic and diegetic spaces in four of Tom Stoppard’s plays; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995). Stoppard’s plays from the 1960s to the 2000s portray different spaces including urban spaces, cities, landscapes, rooms, and fictional sites, thus serving as exceptional textual sources in spatial literary studies.