Abstract
This chapter details Dantean characters and spaces, defining them and then tracing their invention to Dante’s Inferno. A Dantean character is someone who has had an experience of high emotional intensity that connects him to a place and time who then perceives the world and behaves as if still partly stuck in that experience. A Dantean space is a subjective narrative space that is both in the present and also in some sense imbued with a past experience so that it reveals the internal emotional struggles, history, and hopes, dreams or fears of the character. An example is Miss Havisham from Great Expectations: brutally betrayed and abandoned as a young woman on her wedding day, for decades she lives in her tattered wedding dress in her dark grand parlor with the table still laden with the rotting wedding feast. Examples of Dantean Space include Aliens, Amelie, Sunset Blvd, and Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Alighieri, Dante. 2006. The Divine Comedy, trans. and ed. Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin.
Aristotle. 1986. Poetics, trans. S. Halliwell. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Burnett, Francis Hodgson. 1961. The Secret Garden. London: William Heinemann.
Camus, Albert. 1991. The Fall. Vintage Books.
Creed, Barbara. 1990. Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine. In Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn. London: Verso.
D’Adamo, Amedeo. 2013. Dantean Space in the Cities of Cinema. In Media and the City: Urbanism, Technology and Communication, ed. Simone Tosoni, Matteo Tarantino, and Chiara Giaccardi. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Dickens, Charles. 2002. Great Expectations. London: Penguin Classics.
Dostoevski, Fyodor. 2003. The Brothers Karamazov. London: Penguin Classics.
Dostoevski, Fyodor. 2004. The Idiot. London: Penguin Classics.
Finger, Bill et al. 1939. “The Batman Wars against the Dirigible of Doom”, Detective Comics, 33 (November 1939), DC Comics.
Gardiner, Eileen (ed.). 1989. Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante. New York: Italica Press.
Hauge, Michael. 1991. Writing Screenplays that Sell (reprint). New York: Collins Reference.
Lansing, R. (ed.). 2000. The Dante Encyclopedia. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Miller, Frank. 2016. The Dark Knight Returns: 30th Anniversary Edition. DC Comics.
Tolkein, J.R.R. 2011. The Hobbit. New York: HarperCollins.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
D’Adamo, A. (2018). The Frozen Ones: Dantean Moments, Characters and Space in the films Aliens, Amelie, Sunset Blvd, Batman and Others. In: Empathetic Space on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66772-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66772-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66771-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66772-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)