The Cultural Construction of Poe’s Insane Narrator in the Murder Narratives
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Poe’s tales have long been viewed as informed by his obsession with the perverse, the excessive, and the grotesque in human nature. Some earlier critics such as Marie Bonaparte, D. H. Lawrence, and Daniel Hoffman have read Poe’s tragic biography and uncanny writings as expressions of diverse Freudian paradigms, and have speculated that his interest in madness originated primarily from his own neurotic mental problems. Recently, Poe scholars have concentrated on the project of placing him back within the specific American contexts, claiming that to decode Poe outside the antebellum cultural milieu is seriously to misread him. In line with the recent socio-historical trend in Poe criticism, I intend to explore Poe’s insane narrators in “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” in terms of Halttunen’s concept of ‘moral alien,’ which is far removed from the ‘wild beast’ of the eighteenth-century insanity narratives. I will also demonstrate that Poe’s homicidal monomaniacs are deliberately constructed in accordance with the dominant moral-alien discourse in the early nineteenth century.
Abstract
Poe’s tales have long been viewed as informed by his obsession with the perverse, the excessive, and the grotesque in human nature. Some earlier critics such as Marie Bonaparte, D. H. Lawrence, and Daniel Hoffman have read Poe’s tragic biography and uncanny writings as expressions of diverse Freudian paradigms, and have speculated that his interest in madness originated primarily from his own neurotic mental problems. Recently, Poe scholars have concentrated on the project of placing him back within the specific American contexts, claiming that to decode Poe outside the antebellum cultural milieu is seriously to misread him. In line with the recent socio-historical trend in Poe criticism, I intend to explore Poe’s insane narrators in “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” in terms of Halttunen’s concept of ‘moral alien,’ which is far removed from the ‘wild beast’ of the eighteenth-century insanity narratives. I will also demonstrate that Poe’s homicidal monomaniacs are deliberately constructed in accordance with the dominant moral-alien discourse in the early nineteenth century.
참고문헌 (17)
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