Spatial Turn in The Public Burning

Robert Coover’s masterpiece The Public Burning, reproduces the real life of American in contemporary society by reworking historical Rosenberg Event. Joseph Frank’s spatial form theory holds that in modern novels, the time stream is broken and the plot is weakened, demonstrating a spatial tendency. At present, most researches on this novel mainly focus on the time but ignore the space. Based on Joseph Frank’s spatial form theory, this article reinterprets this novel and explores juxtaposition, fragmentation narrative, montage and other postmodernist writing techniques shifting the novel from time to space in plot and structure. So the paper examines the novel from the perspective of space instead of time, avoiding the simplification and closure of the research, making readers understand the spatial effect in post-modernist fictions, which injects new vitality into the evaluation system of postmodernist historical novels.