| Sumario: | The spatialization of time in literary theory offers an important instrument for understanding the representation and experience of temporality in texts in various historical and aesthetic contexts. This paper traces the genealogy of spatialized temporality, from classical poetics to contemporary narratology, and emphasizes how literature consistently converts temporal sequences into spatial frameworks: classical models, including Aristotle's narrative unities and Horace's "Ars Poetica", treat narrative time as an organized, perceivable structure; medieval allegory and typology, exemplified by Augustine and Dante, extend this principle, by rendering salvation history as a symbolic spatial network, in which temporal progression is interpretable only when projected onto topographical and architectural metaphors; Renaissance and early modern authors, including Sidney, Shakespeare, Sterne, and Fielding, further demonstrate the formal manipulation of temporal experience through narrative architecture, typographic experimentation and chronotopic organization, while modernist and postmodernist writers, such as Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Borges, and Calvino, explore subjective temporality through memory, perception, as well as labyrinthine narrative structures; poststructuralist and spatial-theory frameworks, in their turn, conceptualize time as layered, topological and networked, whereas contemporary scholarship in narratology, cognitive literary studies and digital media emphasise the way temporal experience emerges from spatially encoded textual environments, including interactive and virtual narratives. Consequently, by examining these processes, the paper argues that the comprehension of temporality in literary texts is fundamentally spatial and reveals a persistent epistemic strategy, by which literature renders the abstractflow of time intelligible and experientially coherent, and integrates various historical and theoretical perspectives by situating spatialized temporality as a central principle of literary cognition and narrative comprehension.
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