DOI: 10.3366/vic.2023.0506 ISSN: 2044-2416
Holes, Pits, and Caves: Empire, Ecology, and Ontology
Gautam Basu Thakur- Literature and Literary Theory
- Linguistics and Language
- History
- Language and Linguistics
- Communication
- Cultural Studies
This essay examines Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ (1885) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ (1912) in order to discuss how representations of sudden entrapments of colonisers in uncanny chasms such as pits, holes, and caves evoke historical/generational memories of imperial trauma alongside unraveling fundamental truths about human ontology as irretrievably splintered and death driven.