Abstract

The road acquires special significations in the eighteenth-century English novels thus symbolising the permanent quest of the human being for happiness, liberty or knowledge. It reveals the fact that the road is presented as a space with a noteworthy cultural importance echoing values of the eighteenth-century England. Therefore, we intend to show that due to its multifarious functions and meanings, the road constitutes the spatial artery of the eighteenth-century geography, social and cultural life or, as we will see, even of the narrative productions. The motif of the journey is a necessary component of the road chronotope and, together, they form the spatio-temporal axis accompanying and structuring the narrative edifice. A key-space in the literary representations of the period, the road accommodates the majority of the cultural types building the cultural structure: a space of transition, of exchange and of sociability, the road brings the characters together and links different spaces delineating the geography of the real or of the fictitious eighteenth-century England. For this reason, roads are culturally charged spaces recording and echoing eighteenth-century values and realities