The Utopian and the Gothic in Ellis James Davis’s ”Pyrna: A Commune; or, Under The Ice”

Marta Komsta

Abstract


The paper discusses spatial modelling in Ellis James Davis’s Victorian utopia, Pyrna: A Commune; or, Under The Ice (1875) in the context of appropriating the Gothic mode into the utopian convention. In what follows, by examining selected aspects of the novella’s presented world, this article argues that the Gothic tropes of numinosity and sublime constitute significant elements of the examined narrative as major defamiliarizing components of the semiotically monolithic utopian spatial model.


Keywords


utopia; Gothic; sublime; numinous; space

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2019.43.2.31-39
Date of publication: 2019-07-03 11:00:33
Date of submission: 2018-07-21 12:51:26


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