Some of the most interesting facets of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction are his imaginative speculations concerning the metaphysical experiences of the soul, the individual psychic "identity." His interest focuses primarily on three related aspects of the soul's experiences (1) metempsychosis (or reincarnation and transmigration); (2) suspension between "death" and the after-life or states of unconsciousness and consciousness, sleep and waking; and (3) the terrors, real or imagined, of premature burial.

For the purpose of this study, Poe's tales were read and considered carefully in chronological order, the idea being to discover growth and development. Poe's literary career was relatively brief (1832-1849), and there are no dramatic or definite breaks or periods. Though his production shows growth in sophistication and artistry, it has been deemed more instructive to group Poets first-person narrators according to the part they play in the story, that is, (1) main actor or protagonist, (2) minor character, (3) observers and (4) combinations of the foregoing three. An attempt will be made to note both variation and pattern, and hence artistic skill, in Poe Is handling of each particular type of narrator.

How can a literary theorist account for unselected texts and narratives, and measure the importance of voices no longer audible to readers today? The following dissertation uses various, and variously successful 19th century literary texts as a point of departure for considering the complex forces affecting the fragment of texts selected over time from within a wider field of anonymous and unwritten narratives. Bridging literary theory and Darwinian science, "Evolutionary Landscapes" argues that concepts of mutation, replication and selection can provide a framework for thinking about how narratives and genre developed in the 19th century United States. Current attempts to bring biological insights directly into literary study through evolutionary psychology or cognitive Darwinism ignore the complex systems, including cultural and market forces, that might have been used to predict a given text's chances for longer-term survival. The figure I choose to represent these economic, unwritten, and cultural influences on literary texts is the "adaptive landscape" developed by the geneticist Sewall Wright, and recently adapted by the evolutionary theorist Michael Ruse. The relationships between texts and ecologies fore-grounded in the following chapters, even when dealing with individual authors, necessitates looking at literature from the point of view of the random mutation and subsequent selection of texts in the face of a collectively determined ecology of formal expectations. My approach to the evolution of literature builds on the work of the literary critic Franco Moretti and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, although a turn to U.S. rather than British fiction casts a different light on literary evolution than that described yet by Moretti, and deals more specifically with questions of literary and cultural history than either Dennett's philosophy of memetics or Carroll's socio-biologically inflected Literary Darwinism alone would allow. The 19th century literary ecology to which the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Edward Bellamy and Mary Wilkins Freeman were well or poorly adapted can be imagined as a kind of fitness landscape where literary publications are drawn towards the peaks climbed by previous writers, representing conventions or formula that proven successful in the past. A gradualist focus on textual silence and extinction within literary evolution, along with evolutionary and ecological theory, can provide abstract models to make visible the complex ecology of oral, cultural, written, printed and reprinted information that constitutes the "soft tissues" always missing from the archival past.

This essay is based on the premise of psychoanalytical literal theory through a perspective of the author-imprint, or the mirroring neural-effect of the author as an external persona - a force influencing, constructing and enforcing traits, intertextual messages and sublime meanings of the subconscious in the primary text material – the short story Imp of the Perverse, published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1845. The aim is to view this short story in light of Poe's empirically documented destructive personality, proposing that the message of the story, in itself, is more than simply a tale, but part of a larger contextual idea sprung from the pained soul of the author. As primary source for the hypothesis statement, theories by Freud and the later constructions on psychoanalysis as a tool for interpreting literature have been used, such as the collected works of Kurzweil & Phillips (Literature and Psychoanalysis). Further reference will be made to extensive autobiographical works on Poe himself, combined with specific research within the psychoanalytical field by authors such as Dr. Liebig (Criminal Insanity and Hypersensibility in Edgar Allan Poe), M. Bonaparte (The Life and Works of E.A. Poe, a psycho-analytic interpretation) and more. The results of this paper found that the dysfunctional lifestyle and neurotic tendencies of Edgar Allan Poe strongly indicate a connection between his psychological state, his experiences and the message of The Imp of the Perverse. The claim, then, is that Edgar Allan Poe did indeed fuel his short story with direct elements of his own psyche and moral values.

The Inverted Compass traces the influence of geography on early American writing. Maps, quadrants, and compasses are at the heart of America’s most celebrated stories, and these geographic tools shaped how Americans understood themselves and their relationship to the landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the emerging discipline also provided writers a way to address the young Republic’s most pressing political and ethical problems. The word geography itself - from the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing) - articulates the central paradox. Mapping, even as it claims to represent the world, continuously produces it. Literary works follow a similar logic. The Inverted Compass argues that certain early American writers recognized the parallels between mapping and writing and confronted their political implications through narrative fiction. These writers imagined counter-spaces. They created alternate geographies. They inverted the compass. Their allegories, hoaxes, and satires sharpened readers’ awareness of the role of writing and rhetoric in law and government, directing attention to the often-obscured ethical responsibilities related to Westward expansion and the treatment of minority bodies in nineteenth-century America. The Inverted Compass examines the work of Jefferson, Poe, Melville, and Twain alongside exploration narratives, maps, journals, ship logs, field manuals, land surveys, city plans, political cartoons, spelling primers, court cases, land laws, and Congressional documents to uncover the patterns of reading that guide the spatial imagination and its material products.

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Denna uppsats innehåller en komparativ studie kring karaktäriseringen av den fiktiva figuren Madeleine Usher i Edgar Allan Poes 1800-tals novell "The Fall of the House of Usher" och Bethany Griffins re-telling av novellen i sin skräckroman The Fall, publicerad 2014. Syftet är att synliggöra hur Madeleine porträtteras och karaktäriseras ur ett genuskritiskt perspektiv med hjälp av bland annat Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystem och genuskontrakt, samt Maria Nikolajevas narratologiska teori om konvenansen kring litterärt kön. Utifrån denna analys ämnar jag tolka effekterna av Madeleine Ushers skilda subjektspositionering i verken, samt vilken kritik Griffins re-telling därigenom framför.

Thesis--Leipzig. / Cover title. Vita.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio University, 1976. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-239).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of English, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69).