In the Heart of the Sea: The Island as Chronotope in the Tale of the Sphipwrecked Sailor

At the core of the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is the Island of Ka as the remote and exotic setting where the two main characters – the lone sailor and the awe-inspiring serpent – meet and their stories unfold. That landscape is presented as imbued with fantasy and wonder, encoding specific temporal and spatial attributes that inform the narrative and shape the powerful imaginative geography of the whole composition. This paper aims to investigate the literary construction of this spatially and temporally isolated fictional place through the concept of chronotope, arguing that it may be productively understood as an example of chronotope of the sea