Abstract
This paper is aimed at interpreting Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and its portrayal of death in relation to the Holy Qur’an and Arabic literary heritage. This reading provides new insights into the understanding of the story. The paper argues that Poe’s story and its depictions of death allows for a transtextual analysis as it is based, for a significant extent, on stories from the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, which informs of the inevitability of death. In addition, the anatomic study of the story investigates the influence of Arabic literary heritage and its role in arousing the writer’s imagination. Scholarly work notes that Poe’s story follows many traditions of gothic fiction and is often analysed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading. Apart from scholarly work on the story, the paper is purported at rereading the story and explores the transtextual connections and affiliations between the story’s portrayal of death and what Qur’an tells about death. There are striking moments of parallelism between the two sources on the notion of death although the story’s oriental and Islamic references to death shine implicitly through and never made explicit nor directly copy the Qur’anic verse or the Arabic literary sources. Therefore, the paper digs deeply into the story to explore how its representations of death are influenced and shaped by the Holy Qur’an and Arabic literary heritage
Highlights
This paper is aimed at interpreting Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and its portrayal of death in relation to the Holy Qur’an and Arabic literary heritage
Work notes that Poe’s story follows many traditions of gothic fiction and is often analysed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading
This paper argues that the imaginative experience of death constructed in Poe’s ‘The Mask of the Red Death’ is influenced and bears unprecedented resemblance to the Holy Qur’an and some sources of Arabic literature
Summary
‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is probably one of Poe’s (1809-1849) most popular and widely read and criticised short stories. This paper argues that the imaginative experience of death constructed in Poe’s ‘The Mask of the Red Death’ is influenced and bears unprecedented resemblance to the Holy Qur’an and some sources of Arabic literature This transtextual reading aspires mainly to reveal the story’s various depictions of the inevitability as well as the annihilative nature of death as it is based, for a key extent, on stories from the Holy Qur’an. This analytic reading provides new insights on the interesting influence of Arabic literary heritage and its role in conjuring up the writer’s imagination. Genette’s transtextuality or textual transcendence is proposed as a more inclusive term that covers the entire field of intertextuality and provides five subdivisions of the transtextual phenomenon
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