«these heavy sands are language»: The Beach as a Cultural Signifier from Dover Beach to On Chesil Beach

The article focusses on some defining traits of the topos of the beach and the sea shore as a liminal space, challenging and unstable, as it progressively became a recognizable cultural signifier in English modern and contemporary literature.Starting from the model of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, where the beach and the coast are the scenery of a turmoil that announces the epistemological crisis and moral anxieties of the mid-eighteenth century., the shore is analysed in its semantic complexity as a space where the inhabited world is no longer mastered and the awareness of the precariousness and instability of knowledge and existence becomes heightened, in late 19th and early 20th century fictions (R. L Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” , Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects”, “Proteus” in Joyce’s Ulysses). In the final part Ian Mc’Ewan’s On Chesil Beach is examined as an interesting intertextual echo of Arnold’s archetype, in its figuration of the beach as the symbolic locus of displacement.