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

Full Text:

PDF

References


Aguirre, M. (1990). The closed space. Horror literature and western symbolism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Aguirre, M. (2008). Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction. Gothic Studies, 10(2), 1-17.

Blaim, A. (2013). Gazing in Useless Wonder. Bern: Peter Lang.

Botting, F. (1996). Gothic. London and New York: Routledge.

Botting, F. (2012). In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture. In D. Punter (Ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic. Chichester (pp.13-24). West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bulwer-Lytton, E. (1871). The Coming Race. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

Claeys, G. (2009). General Introduction: The Reshaping of the Utopian Genre in Britain, c. 1870-1900. In G. Claeys (Ed.), Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospectus, Vol. 1. (pp. ix-xxxi). London: Pickering & Chatto.

Davis, E. J. (2009). Pyrna: A Commune; or, Under the Ice (1875). In G. Claeys (Ed.), Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospectus, Vol. 1. (pp. 1-64). London: Pickering & Chatto.

Foucault, M. (1984). Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5, 46-49. Retrieved 10 June, 2018, from https://www.foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/.

Kędra-Kardela, A. (2015). The Gothic Space Revisited. In G. Czemiel, J. Galant, A. Kędra-Kardela, A. Kędzierska, & M. Komsta (Eds.), Visions and Revisions. Studies in Literature and Culture (pp. 169-179). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Kędra-Kardela, A., & Kowalczyk A. (2014). The Gothic Canon: Contexts, Features, Relationships, Perspectives. In A. Kędra-Kardela, & A. Kowalczyk (Eds.), Expanding The Gothic Canon. Studies in Literature, Film and New Media (pp. 13-49). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Lotman, M. Y. (1990). Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Sargent, T. L. (1994). The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited. Utopian Studies, 5(1), 1-37.

Shaw, P. (2007). The Sublime. London and New York: Routledge.

Zgorzelski, A. (2004). Born Of The Fantastic. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.




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


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1040
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 649

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2019 Marta Komsta

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.