Drowned Halls and Watery Prisons: Fantastical spaces of water in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

Abstract

Amongst the resources available to mankind, space continues to be the most disputed commodity especially in the post-modern era. With the rising need for climatic action towards the preservation of planetary space, the Anthropocene and its representation in literary works, has been studied with a zest approaching activism accorded through analytical study. However, a similar focus continues to elude the representations of water in creative works, which have only been under the purview of scholarly investigation as recently as the previous decade., The fluid medium of water is as easily accessible as is evasive to the popular imagination and so the various modes of depicting and utilizing water in literature can be analyzed to form conclusions regarding the psych-anatomical as well as cognitive implications and usage, reflected in both virtual and real-world spaces. In the light of rising interest in blue humanities, this paper attempts to ‘blue’ the fantasy craft of Susanna Clarke in Piranesi, and how women’s fantasy writing can be a gateway to hydro spatial explorations of literary and cultural texts