Paisagem do cárcere: o topos literário numa epopeia neolatina

Abstract

The isolation imposed by a locked, dungeon setting makes such setting to appear as the ground of definite boundaries, the “no-landscape” setting. Nevertheless, when the dungeon environment really holds sway, the human spirit’s irreducibility to those four walls stands out. It is a t that point that the power of word and narrative allows the world-space to be taken into the dungeon setting; the human spirit can afford then the possibility of journeying in time and space, even inside his innermost being. This essay aims at highlighting the wealth of classic tradition lying behind “the dungeon” literary topos as a space of meaning. While other classic texts are discussed as well, the main literary corpus being dealt with is a specific Virgil-style, Neolatin epopee. The piece is made of twelve chants, six of which take place inside a particular dungeon.