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Publication details [#67145]

Atassi, Sami H. 2019. Playing with the Sovereign's Plague in “King Pest”: A Summoning of Poe's Necromantic Humor in War-Torn Syria. Studies in American Humor 5 (2) : 351–371.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Penn State University Press

Annotation

Probably Poe's profoundest and dreariest pasquinade, “King Pest the First: A Tale Containing an Allegory” has always baffled readers. This paper explores this gross slice of Poe's humor and examines the ways that it might disrupt and/or lend itself to his principles on aesthetic effect. The paper uses the terms and conclusions of this reading, further, to allegorize Poe's laughter in one of the most plagued regions of the early twenty-first century: the death world of war-torn Syria manufactured by a coalition of sovereign pests.