Publications

Publication details [#11490]

Filippakopoulou, Maria. 2003. Reflective operations in Edgar Allan Poe's transatlantic reception. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.

Abstract

This thesis explores the literary reputation of Edgar Allan Poe by linking two separate moments of his reception: the one in mid-nineteenth-century French discourse and the other in early twentieth-century Anglophone criticism. These moments are illustrated, on the one hand, by the appropriation project of his translator, Charles Baudelaire, and, on the other, by the critical essays of William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. The thesis builds a system of relations between these selected contexts by making the Baudelairean project the fulcrum of the Anglophone writings; these are considered to be an oblique, spill-over effect of his montage-piece which ennobled Poe aesthetically in European modernist contexts. The findings of textual analysis are pitted against one another so as to identify discursive instances of accord and departure in each critical account of the aesthetic value of Poe’s work. The juxtaposition is used in order to bring about the transatlantic negotiation that takes place therein, but also the overdetermination that characterises the two opposing national repertories.
Source : Based on publisher information