Open AccessThe Utopian and the Gothic in Ellis James Davis’s ”Pyrna: A Commune; or, Under The Ice”
Author(s) -
Marta Komsta
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
lubelskie materiały neofilologiczne/lublin studies in modern languages and literature
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2450-4580
pISSN - 0137-4699
DOI - 10.17951/lsmll.2019.43.2.31-39
Subject(s) - sublime , novella , utopia , context (archaeology) , narrative , art history , art , philosophy , humanities , literature , history , archaeology
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.