The Uncanny Other: Edgar Allan Poe’s America A Ph.D. Thesis

فرضية

2015

Abstract
 

The Uncanny Other: Edgar Allan Poe’s America undertakes revisionist readings of Poe’s canonical and lesser-known texts with reference to standard psychoanalytic works on the (mainly Freudian) unheimlich, to re-examine them in transatlantic- and reception-studies frameworks. The thesis argues that because Poe portrays his American identity as multiple, marginal and fundamentally transatlantic, Poe’s place in the canons of American literature has become an enduring subject of controversy. Chapter I, “Poe and America as a Border Culture: Masks and Masques of American Literature,” analyses Poe’s celebration of the hybridity of his antebellum literary culture in narratives of heterotopic carnivals which he imbues with a distinctly Modern temporality. This carnivalesque expression translates into further heterogeneity in the forms of intertextuality that the thesis reads in Chapter II, “Poe’s Purloined Letters: Plagiarism, “Marginalia” and Uncanny Authorship”. Chapter III, “The Other’s Look: Re-enactments and the French Poe,” investigates the commodification of art and artist in the works of Poe, and explores how, using modern specular metaphors, they become intertwined with his representation of national American identity, and his reception by French Symbolists. Chapter IV, “The American Double: ‘Inescapable Poe’,” presents a discussion of this French influence amongst Anglo-American literary circles, which had complicated effects on his status in his native literary culture (and language). Finally, the thesis argues that Poe’s legibility as an American artist is both his challenge to and achievement in an internationalised (and a self-consciously fabricated) United States literature. This thesis does not aim to undermine Poe’s reputation as an outsider and literary trickster; conversely, it will argue that Poe’s status as a proto-modern and quintessentially American artist is the product of his hoaxing strategies.

• نوع عمل المنشور: دكتوراه