Unlike time, the concept of space has only recently come into the focus of narratology, stimulated as a side effect of the spatial turn.

The term spatial turn refers to the exploration of space in cultural, social, and literary studies, which has led to a new understanding of space as a knowledge-producing factor. It has opened up possibilities for analyzing spaces and representations of space as constitutive elements of the individual appropriation of the world. Space no longer appears as an immutable entity, but as a fluid, subjectively experienced and processed factor. As a "child of postmodernity" (Bachmann-Medick 2010, 284; trsl. is our own), the spatial turn is linked to an overarching tendency to break away from a fixation on time and temporal phenomena inherent to modernity and to rehabilitate space as the formerly "impure stepbrother of time" (Böhme 2005, XII; trsl. is our own; Assmann 2008, 139). This distancing from an interest in mind and time that is perceived as idealistic, conditions a new, pragmatically understood interest not only in space, but also in the body, the world of things, and aspects of materiality.

Narratology of space differentiates, among other things, between the actual location of a plot (setting) and those spaces that are part of the narrated world only via reports, dreams, imaginings (frames; de Jong 2014, 107). Other approaches analyze literary represented space in a triadic model based on three different ways of perception by consciousness: Tuned Space, Action Space, and Viewing Space (Haupt 2004). Depending on whether (a) the atmospheric coloring of space is in the foreground, (b) the interaction between characters and space, or (c) the question of how the subject sees space and, conversely, how space presents itself to the perceiving subject ('seeing and being seen)', the focus of a narrative text or individual sections lies on one of the three types of space mentioned. These do not form separate, mutually exclusive spaces, but can be superimposed like overlays. In Ovid's narrative of Actaeon (Metamorphoses 3, 131-252), a description of place is given at the beginning: The hero arrives at a valley forested with cypress trees (v. 155: vallis erat piceis et acuta densa cupressu): through the symbolism of death associated with the cypress tree, the space takes on a certain tone or atmosphere that hints at the bad end of Actaeon, who, after accidentally seeing the goddess Diana bathing, is turned into a deer as punishment and then killed by his own hunting dogs.

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