Places of retreat: Stone Yard Devotional

This essay explores the narrative place of religious monastic retreat in contemporary literary fiction. Using examples from Charlotte Wood’s novel Stone Yard Devotional, the article proposes that the monastic space of the storyworld has the potential to characterise a mentally projected environment which invites readers, writers, and to an extent their fictional characters, to withdraw into ‘cells’ of memory and imagination. Despite detaching from the world, the protagonist in Stone Yard Devotional cannot escape the cell of her own thoughts and feelings of guilt about environmental and social injustices. The argument draws on medieval Christian rhetorical theories which associate individual monastic dwellings to the functions of memory and imagination. This is further contextualised in narrative theory, ecocritical approaches and cognitive literary theory relating to mental time travel and the brain’s default mode network.