A community's social and cultural life is given to seasonal patterns representing a complex interplay between economic demands and traditional (for example religious) influences. Where such seasonality is found in literature, its representation is further shaped by the author's conscious aims and interests as well as his or her sensitivity to the powerful but typically unspoken dynamic between self and environment. In the study of any one text, the analysis of this dynamic and its seasonal implications may be an effective guide to the psychological assumptions on which the plot is built. When applied to a genre or cultural corpus as a whole, however, connotations of space and season provide information about the intersubjective map shared by the culture in which these texts have their origin. Although the world represented in narrative literature should not be understood to correspond without qualification to reality as its authors and audience saw it, that literary world nevertheless stems from the culture's mental map of the world and demands to be explained by it. The combined set of seasonal chronotopes employed in the literary output of a given society is in large part an exaggeration of the psychological associations of landscapes and seasons that had currency in that culture, thus aiding the construction of a psychological anthropology.

Sedentary societies are naturally given to some degree of core-andperiphery thinking: regardless of its spatial configuration, an inhabited area will be more familiar to its residents than the world beyond it. That extrasocietal spaces are associated with threats and monsters is therefore not surprising. However, the psychological and narrative functions of these spaces may be better understood once it is recognized that they are not all equal. Instead, they are subject to various evaluations and literary functions depending on the landscape category and the season represented. By studying the narrative functions of specific landscapes and seasons, we may attain a more detailed understanding of literary genre while contributing a literary body of evidence for the study of a culture's psychological reflexes to season and environment.

In our perception of the world, the sedentary universal of core-andperiphery thinking combines with the heuristic universal of category simplification. Peripheral landscape categories are grouped with other untrusted concepts, including the monsters we postulate as the agents behind natural threats.