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Victorian Social Norms Abbott's Flatland

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Victorian Social Norms Abbott's Flatland
In order to ask the reader to question Victorian social norms Abbott employs the use of estrangement. He achieves this through his depiction of Flatland: it may be geologically and aesthetically different as a 2-Dimensional landscape, but the social norms and customs of the residents are parallel to that of the Victorians. Khanna describes: ‘The other world proposed in such fiction not only stretches the imagination of what is possible in social organisation, but also makes us see our present society with new eyes… The “cognitive estrangement” so achieved allows us to see problems in our society that we were able to ignore before.’ (39) Cognitive estrangement is especially relevant to Flatland because the reader is estranged from reality and

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