Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Abstract

All abstract excerpts (save for Tsokanos’s) are copied from the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses online database.“Missing Homes” examines three nineteenth-century authors whose experiences of displacement from home, professions and/or class influenced their literary innovations…. Attention to these authors, I argue, offers a parallel theory of nostalgia in which the unsettled longing for a place to call home registers political discontent with the relationship between the individual and the collective rather than reconciles the individual to displacement.“Hypnaesthesis” argues for understanding somnambulism, nightmare, and insomnia as aesthetic categories in the gothic and dark romantic traditions of antebellum American literature that provide critical insights into the experiential costs of the exhortations to normative vigilance prevalent in the American Enlightenment. During this period unceasing vigilance became the watchword for liberty as the Lockean conception of the self, understood as dependent on waking consciousness, fused with Protestant and Enlightenment ideas about salvation, productivity, and freedom to form the philosophical and political core of American identity. By exploring the nocturnal territory of thought through aesthetic experience in the works of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, I show how American literature provides alternative paths for post-enlightenment thinking, introducing sleep as a fundamental problem for reimagining subjectivity and collectivity.“Decomposition as Explanation” looks to literature and visual art that addresses literature’s paradoxical relationship to duration, using Edgar Allan Poe—whose 1846 poetics statement, “Philosophy of Composition,” points to this representational provocation—as my point of departure. I read Poe’s poetic vocabulary, his tales, and his magazine hoaxes in paratextual relation to various visual art and writing practices of the post–World War II period—namely, the installations of French artist Pierre Huyghe, the poetry and performance of Vito Acconci, the AIDS writing of Hervé Guibert, and the conceptual-confessional poetry of Trisha Low—to offer a description of what I call counter-duration…. My research highlights French and American art and literature practices whose conceptual strategies, media politics, and social critiques provide a new lens by which to reinterpret Poe’s politics of form, as well as a way to redescribe a history of experimental writing.“Spontaneous Form: Four Studies in Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction” rethinks modernist stream of consciousness narration and its precursors in light of a critical epistemology informed by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and William James. I trace an experimental literary counter-tradition from Victor Hugo and Edgar Allan Poe to Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison that parodies philosophical empiricism by foregrounding what Kant called the “spontaneity” of the mind—that dimension by which we actively construct our knowledge.Gothic narratives employ doubles partly to challenge the notion of a stable, coherent self. My dissertation focuses on characters whose doubles arise within the characters’ own minds, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “William Wilson,” and the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” These characters suggest that what readers really should fear is not a gothic villain or supernatural entity, but rather what might be lurking within an apparently healthy mind and brain. In examining these characters, I employ the nineteenth-century scientific theory of the dual brain, which suggests that the two symmetrical hemispheres of the brain can function separately, and that if something disturbs the balance between the two hemispheres, it could cause a drastic personality change, or even reveal a second distinct personality.“‘Finding is the First Act’: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Science” examines the presence, role, and significance of the discourse of science in the work of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Silas Weir Mitchell, and Karl Pearson, among others. Beginning with the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830, this dissertation argues that the paradigm shift in the status and prominence of scientific discourse had profound and variegated impacts on literary production that have so far escaped sustained attention…. This dissertation takes into account the unintended consequences, the failures, the misperceptions, and the scientifically reinforced prejudices and biases that are often omitted from accounts of scientific progress in order to examine the manner in which contemporary writers seized upon them as evidence of a failure inherent in the discourse of science.The period from 1799 through 1929 marks a remarkable era of development for gothic themes in American mystery and investigative fiction. From early “mysteries of detection” through more structurally formalized detective stories, this project examines the differences in the gothic modes and devices employed by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katharine Green, Mark Twain, and Dashiell Hammett, and their significant contributions to the progression of the popular gothic detective genre…. This study adds to the understanding of gothic detective fiction as an important cultural registry of social concerns through a close examination of key texts to engage with each author’s stylistic contributions and cultural concerns and illustrate a continuous arc of development over time.A multitude of references to the Hellenic and Latin antiquities are present in some of Poe’s most prominent short stories and poems…. Poe was a philhellene inspired by his literary idol, Lord Byron, and by the neoclassical movement…. The aim of this dissertation is to delve into intertextuality through Poe’s Hellenic undertones in an effort to … stress their importance in the construction of his creative universe.Each chapter of “Wandering Comparisons” spotlights a nineteenth-century flâneur from outside of France and foregrounds an aspect of flânerie obscured by its conventional Baudelairean account. Recovering these indigenous practices of flânerie allows non-Western traditions to point to their own histories of modernity…. The third chapter takes Edgar Allan Poe as a starting point and channels his interest in the occult. There I argue that a prolific discourse of enchantment—not a residual “Oriental” element, but in fact the product of a number of Western fin-de-siècle spiritualist movements—complicates Max Weber’s iconic association of modernity with the “disenchantment of the world.” Flânerie in this mystical sense discloses itself at the level of form: the human flâneur is displaced into the realm of the idea. What follows is a figurative form of flânerie, a narrative bricolage of competing voices, infused with oracular energy and informed by the logic of spontaneity.In this study, I argue that in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838), and “Eleonora” (1842), Herman Melville’s Confidence Man (1857), and Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), the trope of metempsychosis—the supposed transmigration of the soul to another body at the time of death—complicates the process of sympathetic identification and marks its limits…. Anticipating late twentieth- and early twenty-first century criticisms, these texts reveal that sympathy is not only difficult for the sympathizer to attain and sustain but also perhaps damaging to the recipient, particularly when the sympathizer is white and the recipient is not…. Ultimately, the action of metempsychosis in these texts offers modes of relation premised on difference rather than commonality, and on not knowing rather than knowing—intellectual and ethical stances that are potentially useful for the twenty-first century and beyond.This dissertation explores the abiding American fascination with the European Middle Ages, that nebulous historical periodization spanning roughly the Fall of Rome (410 CE) to Columbus’s arrival in the New World (1492 CE). Recent research in the field of postcolonial medievalism, when brought to bear upon canonical works of American literature such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, reveals the extent to which American medievalisms exist as creole medievalisms, simultaneously sublimating modern European colonial contestations and subverting those contestations by reinterpreting the history and literature of the Middle Ages in terms of a non-European and modern spacetime.This project reconsiders our contemporary and canonical understanding of nineteenth-century American literature and literary history … defined by critics like F. O. Matthiessen and those who have revised his early work, such as Jane Tompkins and David S. Reynolds. This project attempts a continued revision, expansion, and redefinition through an examination of existing paradigms through a network theory approach. This theory approach observes a critically overlooked yet important literary center during the nineteenth century, Philadelphia. This small, local network is examined and contextualized within current understandings of literary history and then placed within larger national and international networks of literary production, dissemination, and reception. Edgar Allan Poe, due to his prominent place in the canon of American literature, serves as a point of access to the print culture and literary networks of Philadelphia during the years he lived and worked there, 1838–44. This work is an effort to expand our understanding of the complicated term American literature as we engage with it today and historically.By attending to the aesthetics of imaginative housing, or dynamic forms of inanimate containers, this dissertation delves into ongoing negotiations of what gets to count as human and as animate. I track this concept across a historically broad array of American fiction and film from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2001) and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). In attending to “housing” in these texts, I seek to understand how aesthetic forms can unsettle the relationship between interiors and exteriors in ways that bring the distinctive characters populating these texts to life. Each chapter isolates and names particular instances of houses and structures that disrupt static or passive containment, a critical move that builds on Diana Fuss’s study of modernity’s sensuous and formative imbrication of material spaces with internal, psychological structures. Where Fuss specifically attends to how interiors have shaped writerly imaginations, this dissertation shifts focus to how material surfaces put characters into animating relations. Ultimately at stake in attending to the relational construction of artificial characters is illuminating the constructed nature of human character.“Untimely Verse” treats Phillis Wheatley, Rufus Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman as major authors, but it takes a narrower interest in recovering how their work circulated, as material texts and as a developing set of ideas about American poetry and authorship within antebellum periodical and book formats. Thematically, the dissertation is organized around issues of print temporality and the project of reading the contemporary practice of American verse as an at once historical and yet-still-emergent category of poetry. It traces how Wheatley, Poe, and Whitman developed and reflected a growing interest in exemplary and untimely circulation in antebellum America, while the labors of the indefatigable anthology czar, Rufus Griswold, came to embody the all-too-timely values of an American poetry written and published for its day, eventuating in the twentieth-century notion of an obsolete poetry synonymous with a graveyard of forgettable and largely forgotten poets.Featuring Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson as representative authors, this dissertation argues that the biblical Apocalypse is a primary subject of American Gothic literature during the early to mid-nineteenth century and beyond, and that authors of the era appropriated the Gothic mode as a way of expressing America’s collective cultural anxieties about national identity. These authors’ works are contextualized within their historical moment through a study of primary documents like letters, journals, personal libraries, historical periodicals, and other cultural influences. By framing biblical subject matter as Gothic, these authors contradict the sentimental and mainstream religious narrative of their contemporary society. Their pairing of Gothic and apocalyptic frameworks also suggests that the definition of American Gothic should be broadened to include Apocalypse in its range of featured subjects, and that this narrative pairing is peculiarly American.Poe’s early grievance in “Sonnet—To Science” (1829) against science’s epistemological authority transitioned into a lifelong journey of increasingly fruitful maneuvering. Poe’s engagement with science reached its apogee in Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), his cosmological and aesthetic treatise published near the end of his life. While exalting intuition and poetic imagination as the pathway to Truth, Eureka builds upon, questions, and revises a wealth of scientific authorities and astronomical works…. This study scrutinizes a distinctive set of Poe’s works across his literary career to demonstrate how science, astronomy, and related fields, in particular, assisted and motivated Poe to seek the Truth and build a universe…. The works analyzed include “Al Aaraaf” (1829), “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), the extensive endnote (1839) to the tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), “The Power of Words” (1845), and Eureka (1848). Poe incorporated numerous astronomical events, discoveries, and theories, the most significant of which include Tycho Brahe’s supernova, lunar voyages, the United States Exploring Expedition, William Herschel’s and Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis, Newton’s laws of gravity, and Kepler’s law of planetary orbits. Instead of dismissing these scientific references as springboards for poetic imagination, this study inspects these scientific texts and contexts more closely to uncover their epistemological role in Poe’s cosmos. The study argues that epistemological challenges and problems posed by scientific developments stimulated Poe to investigate the elusive nature of knowledge and develop his method of obtaining Truth. By contemplating the merits and limitations of science, Poe achieved his own fusion of science and poetic invention.Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid-nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent, ecstatic, individual, and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic…. Writers like Ottobah Cugoano, Venture Smith, John Jea, and, later, Edgar Allan Poe, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Herman Melville, in Redburn: His First Voyage, recognized the dehumanizing potential of this power arrangement. They described the ways in which humans could be commodified or rendered invisible by the operations of a market that used individuals for its own ends and maintained the aegis of divine sovereignty.When George du Maurier’s infamous mesmerist Svengali performs on his elastic penny whistle, the instrument produces a sound “more human almost than the human voice itself.” The suggestion that a voice could be more, or conversely less, human calls attention to the precariousness of a category under threat in the nineteenth century. My project confronts the enigmatic nature of voices in transatlantic Gothic fiction in relation to definitions of the human, attending to figures that frustrate taxonomic classification in sonic as well as visual terms. Discussions of stethoscopic listening, physiognomy, vivisection, and mesmerism in Britain and the United States frame my chapters, underscoring a nineteenth-century preoccupation with embodiment foundational for both literary and medical knowledge. Through an analysis of bodies as soundscapes in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, among others, my project discovers an attention to voice as a recalcitrant force that subverts scientific authority over bodies.This thesis examines the repeated appearance of liminal white voices in antebellum American fiction. It identifies a number of white characters who inhabit the boundary between life and death and produce inexplicable voices: talking corpses, ghosts, ventriloquists, spiritualist mediums, and non-human bodies. It argues that Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville continually associate dead, dying, and supernatural white figures with African Americans and Native Americans to amplify these white characters’ own marginal positions within their communities. While existing criticism classifies the non-white and female body as a site of otherness, this thesis identifies marginality within the white male citizen himself. The six chapters examine how authors articulate liminal whiteness in different vocal contexts: ventriloquism in Brown, storytelling in Irving, blackface minstrelsy in Bird, medical discourse in Poe, enchanting speech in Hawthorne, and wordlessness in Melville. Across these texts, the liminal figure’s voice disturbs essentialist racial ideologies and challenges prescriptions of citizenship in the antebellum period. Inexplicable voices act as powerful articulations of liminal whiteness that question, contest, or negate antebellum ideals of the autonomous, rational, industrious, social, and respectable white citizen. This thesis demonstrates that antebellum authors employ liminal white voices across the border of life and death to both explore and attempt to contain threats and anxieties of fragile or negated white citizenship. In doing so, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of whiteness and citizenship in the antebellum period.This thesis looks at conflict as a unifying, ubiquitous concept that runs throughout all Gothic literature, specifically looking at nineteenth-century Gothic texts. The texts chosen are “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This study … [argues] that analysis of Gothic literature should be positioning conflict as a central theme, one which runs through each text and arguably is the defining aspect of this body of literature. The texts have been chosen for their variety and show the importance of conflict as a unifying factor, given the wide reach and influence of Gothic literature as a whole. Each text is studied both as an independent work that thrives in conflict, as well as another text that contributes to the larger reliance on conflict. The aim here is to address a gap in current critical writings and highlight that time and time again, Gothic literature can be boiled down to disagreements and conflicts, of all sizes and severities.