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This article examines the obscenity trials against Kenneth Anger's short films Fireworks and Scorpio Rising. I offer an analytical framework, undergirded by an iteration of Edgar Allan Poe's concept of 'unity of effect', to understand the claims the prosecution and defence made about Anger's films. I explore the interpretative difficulties the films, as short queer films, posed for the legal actors as they grappled with the 'taken-as-a-whole' stipulation of obscenity law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the transfer process of the melancholy tone in Ch. Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” The comparison between both variants of the translation, done respectively in 1853–1854 and 1864, allows us to understand the changes within Baudelaire’s aesthetics. While translating “The Raven,” Baudelaire faces Poe’s idea of a “melancholy tone” as the basis of the poem and its relevance to its general meaning. The article shows how, throughout this process, Baudelaire rebuilds such a melancholy tone by following the structure given by Poe and adding from himself. This endeavor would not only create a new melancholy tone for “The Raven” but also change the way Baudelaire would create the melancholy ambiance in his further works.

In this paper, I set out to demonstrate how Poe and Barth understand Arabic narrative showcased in The Arabian Nights , and why they show so much approximation, deviation, and swerve. In their misreading, both Poe and Barth reveal much about the mechanism of the incorporation of Arabic narrative as much as they convey their own cultural and literary concerns. Premised on postcolonial and postmodern theory, I show how the American Orientalism of Poe and Barth perpetrates a misrepresentation of both Arabic narrative, Muslims, and the East. While Foucault's 'conditions of possibility' pertain to a cultural context that is bound to inform writing, there is also the predilection of both writers to maraud Alf Laylah wa-Laylah as their free zone, a colony of a sort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RESUMO O ensaio propõe uma releitura do conto “Os óculos de Pedro Antão”, de Machado de Assis, publicado no Jornal das Famílias em 1874. Como ele não foi incorporado por Machado em suas coletâneas, o drama acabou recebendo pouca atenção. Sugere-se que o texto decompõe, de forma paródica, o gênero do romance policial, em possível diálogo com a produção literária de Edgar Allan Poe. Além disso, ao indicar a inépcia analítica do narrador, o Bruxo de Cosme Velho explicita a artificialidade da literatura.

With its ability to subvert our perceptions of the world, AI can create images of quirky strangeness and charm, resulting in hyper‐surrealist juxtapositions of form and uncanny beauty. Founding partner of Young & Ayata and Associate Professor at the Cooper Union, New York, Michael Young investigates recent output from architect Karel Klein and her collaborators, and speculates on the power of their 'estrangements' and the capitalist underbelly of AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of control—over bodies, knowledge, narrative, and nation—interweaves throughout Dana Medoro's Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion and Stephanie Peebles Tavera's (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Medoro focuses on discourses of life and women's (non)reproductive sexuality in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. She establishes that the two authors were deeply skeptical of medicolegal definitions of life that created racial and economic hierarchies; through focal characters and indirect, playful prose, they critique discourses of life that valued some lives over others in the creation of Anglo-American nationalism. Tavera investigates late-nineteenth-century woman-authored medical fiction as directly engaging many of the same concepts Medoro explores. (P)rescription Narratives calls attention to the ways that Comstock-era censorship colluded with race science, medicine, and the law to limit women's sexual and reproductive autonomy. It demonstrates literature's agential capacities as the writers it addresses explicitly refute and redirect objectifying narratives. Combined, these texts show that questions of what "counts" as life, and by what (and whose) paradigms those lives can be lived, are hardly theoretical musings. Rather, they determine, systemically and corporeally, "life's legibility and reproduction ... in the name of American citizenship" (Medoro 19). These texts, in other words, are highly relevant and important as literary and cultural scholarship, making a powerful argument for the study of the humanities. But they are also important because they document the subversive and agential power of the written word to discern, document, and possibly heal—to affect change for today and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embora Edgar Allan Poe e Charlotte Perkins Gilman tenham sido discutidos comparativamente, a maioria dos estudos focou mais em suas diferenças do que em suas semelhanças. Muitos estudos focam apenas na escrita feminista de Gilman (1892) ou na loucura de Poe (1843). A maior proximidade já feita dessas duas obras se deu quando Băniceru (2015) discutiu suas similaridades através da domesticidade do gótico. Por isso, o objetivo deste trabalho é analisar um outro tipo de proximidade entre as obras, a partir de uma metáfora que paira sobre os enredos de ambos os contos: a mulher emparedada. Ela aproxima os contos na representação da violência física e psicológica que as mulheres sofreram ao longo do século XIX e ainda sofrem. Para tanto, a análise foi feita através de uma revisão bibliográfica, a partir de um panorama dos contos e de seus autores, bem como das perspectivas críticas da psicanálise e do feminismo para tratar da literatura gótica. Em seguida, foram explorados aspectos da violência doméstica partindo do ponto principal, que são as mulheres presas nas paredes e, por fim, como a liberdade dessas mulheres é representada. As obras de Poe e Gilman não apenas refletem as ansiedades sociais de suas épocas, mas também permanecem relevantes na discussão contemporânea sobre a saúde mental, a violência de gênero e a luta pela liberdade. A literatura gótica, com suas camadas de significado e simbolismo, continua a ser um campo fértil para a exploração das complexidades da condição humana, especialmente no que diz respeito às experiências das mulheres.

Rose Wright and Eugene Smith's Edgar Allan Poe Tarot follows the basic structure of the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) tarot system. Each of the cards features an illustration by Smith that draws inspiration from and visually adapts an element of Poe's work, depicting imagery, characters, and narrative moments. This tarot deck synthesizes these two distinct and interconnected types of "reading," with the accompanying guide providing both an interpretation of the card's significance drawing on the larger RWS system and critical literary analysis that connects Poe's work to the specific card and its interpretation. The active engagement of reader response presents a wide range of interpretive possibilities and ways of connecting with and responding to Poe's work through visual adaptation and the self-reflection central to the tarot tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the translation of Edgar Allan Poe's tales in Taiwan from post-war to the contemporary era. Despite the huge enthusiasm in translating his works, limited studies have been done on how Poe is translated in the local context. To provide a systematic description on how Poe's tales have been translated between 1950 and 2020, a total of 88 translations of Poe's tales published within the specified time frame have been studied and analyzed, with four different text processing modes identified in the so-called "translation" of Poe: fake translations, local translations, adaptations and repackaged translations. Further analysis of the four modes demonstrates how Poe as a literary sign has been reprocessed and repositioned for various purposes. The intricate interplay between translation and reprocessing gives rise to hybridity, which defines the reception of Poe's tales in Taiwan and reflects how translation as a literary production practice has been appropriated, negotiated, confronted and compromised in this post-colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Académique des Études Sociales et Humaines is the property of Hassif Benbouali University of Chlef and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A book by a well-known Russian scholar and literary critic Elvira P. Osipova is a collection of essays written by the author at different times and dedicated to the works of the most significant American writers of the 19–20th centuries. The researcher focuses on the problems of philosophical and social views of writers, the connection of their works with the sociocultural context, and their sense of the tradition of American Romanticism and its humanistic emphasis. The essays are presented in chronological order — from Edgar Allan Poe to the writers of the late 20th century, the principle that allows to trace the humanistic emphasis of American literature throughout its two century history.

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.

This article analyzes the implications of incestuous perversions in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' in relation to the author's most-praised techniques: the unity of effect. Through an in-depth examination of the work and a selection of expressions and descriptions, this essay reflects on how the unity of effect is built and maintained due to the perversity of incest and on how this incestuous union helps create what, consequently, can be considered the unity of affect. Two key elements stand out in this work through which words and deeds are selected to create this unity of affect/effect: characters and setting. As for the characters, through the analysis of the peculiar unity (of affect) between the twins Roderick and Madeline, the shadow of incest is perceived, which eventually destroys the property of the Ushers as well as their entire lineage. As for the setting, its isolation also places into evidence, on the one hand, the unity of effect it brings to the story and, on the other hand, the incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeline, which simultaneously creates the unity of affect, the concept from which the original scholarly contribution of this article derives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have read Edgar Allan Poe as uniquely enmeshed in an interdisciplinary and intermediary web connecting the visual and practical arts. Poe's prose is intrinsically multimodal and multisensory, a transgression of disciplinary boundaries that leads to a horrific affect. This article examines three of Poe's short stories with attention to the figure of the artist, architect, and author within his fiction, arguing that these characters can be read as exemplars of Poe's aesthetic philosophy laid out in "The Philosophy of Composition." Poe pushes and explores the limits of disciplinary boundaries by showing the various conjunctions and conflations inherent to artistic practice. In his stories, Poe explores what distinguishes literature from other creative endeavors. It is his fascination with the porous nature of artistic boundaries that drives both the form and content of his tales—and it is this very liminality, this porousness, that makes them truly the harbingers of horror as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Winnicott’s model of the tolerance for paradox offers a new perspective on Edgar Allan Poe’s pieces of literature and on the fact that ambiguous reference in fiction does not result in its being perceived as meaningless. In the present article, I argue that Edgar Allan Poe’s writings sought to resurrect the satisfying illusion of what Donald Winnicott termed “the transitional phase”. In a sense, literature is the space where remnants of the subject’s illusion of totally creative power over things and objects, its sense of omnipotence, must negotiate with and confront the reality principle. By being referential to a world to which it does not refer, fiction sets up the very condition which, according to Winnicott, founds the emergence of the self. Fiction thus may allow readers, in a paradoxical way (by their “non-interfering presence”), to experience the unspeakable as having a voice.

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article tackles fictional renderings of the mechanics of trauma. The analysis is dedicated to the question of what a trauma narrative is and how the subject of/ in trauma is constituted. I begin with the assumption that what we are looking for in a literary work of art is not simply its meaning but the way in which that meaning is produced. All in all, I argue that in disaster zones, defined by the occurrence of the unspeakable, the signifying chain is interrupted, broken. What remains are disconnected things, events, images, and words: thoughts without a thinker, as Wilfred Bion would say. Repression is not possible, since it depends on the signifiers of an inscription, which is impossible in this case. Whereas the repressed unconscious can be defined, with Lacan, as the memory of what we forget, what we are dealing with in the case of catastrophes is a memory of what cannot be forgotten. Any effort to repair this hole in the continuity of the linguistic fabric reveals these creases, despite any attempt at mending. They are the bearers of truth: a-letheia.

The present paper examines how Cassandra Clare uses Edgar Allan Poe's work to create her own stories in The Dark Artifices saga. She published this trilogy between 2016 and 2018 and used three of Poe's poems as the main source of inspiration for each novel. The first one, Lady Midnight, is based on "Annabel Lee"; the second one, Lord of Shadows, draws from "Dreamland"; and the last one, Queen of Air and Darkness, has "The City in the Sea" as inspiration. Clare uses Poe's poetry both directly as chapter titles, indirectly in the plot, and, in the case of the second and third book, as an introduction to the novel. Furthermore, she uses gothic aesthetics and concepts to make a connection with the American writer. The analysis is approached from a theoretical framework based on Julie Sanders' Adaptation and Appropriation, and Genette's theory of transtextuality. It will analyze how this saga engages with Poe's ideas and aesthetic in this young-adult fantasy story in order to assess whether this new approach to the Gothic is an appropriation of Poe's work, and how it is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectral presence of Edgar Allan Poe in Thomas Hardy's works has been occasionally pointed out by critics that situate Hardy within the Gothic tradition. Both writers, as some critics have argued, demonstrate a distinct flair for Gothic horror. Yet the full scope of the affinity between Poe's and Hardy's Gothic sensibilities lies beyond their shared investment in Gothic trappings. Through a comparative reading of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), this essay argues that both writers have recourse to the aesthetic principles inherent in Gothic architecture to construct their literary Gothic. The science of geometry provides an aesthetic template for the architectonics of these two literary works. Both Poe's and Hardy's characters evince an ontological merging with Gothic architecture. At the same time, a marked difference exists between these two writers' Gothic aesthetic. Poe's Gothic vision is highly mechanical and inorganic, whereas Hardy's work exhibits an interplay between mechanical constructiveness and organic spontaneity. Hardy's Gothic aesthetic is further complicated by the issue of architectural restoration, a corollary of his close involvement in the Gothic Revival during his architectural career. This essay not only strengthens the literary affinity between these two writers, but also contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the intriguing relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature. Particularly, it sheds new light upon the way in which Hardy's first career as a Gothic draughtsman shapes his distinct Gothic art-principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Poligramas is the property of Universidad del Valle and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Poe invents the detective story in English, introducing his gentleman sleuth Auguste Dupin as he solves the locked-room mystery of two women found brutally murdered in a Paris apartment. In L'Amante Anglaise (1967), Duras revisits the detective form, fictionalizing the true 1949 crime of a woman murdering and dismembering her cousin in Viorne, France. These literary detective stories highlight the powerful but unspoken role of affective experience in driving what appears, on the surface, to be a forensic medical or psychological investigation. In both tales, peculiarity is an affective and cognitive force that, contrary to what the majority of affect literature argues, inherently moves toward resolution and closure. Using peculiarity as an analytical concept, we argue that the concealment / discovery binary must acknowledge its affective origins, breaking a barrier between narrative scholarship and medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reads Miroslav Válek’s (1927 – 1991) poem “Večer [Evening]” published in the poet’s first collection of verse Dotyky ([Touches], 1959) as a deconstructive subversion of lyric tradition – of Ivan Krasko’s (1876 – 1958) symbolist model of the lyric and Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809 – 1849) “The Raven” (1845). The author argues that Válek subverts the tradition by the specific way he tackles the motifs of the night, rain, and raven known in the Slovak poetry mainly from the writing of Ivan Krasko and by the way the poet updates the lyric situation of Poe’s notoriously well-known poem and its central motif. Another aspect that gets subverted is the tragic-elegiac melancholic modality of the poem. The analysis notices the first line of the poem where the night setting is outlined, then moves on to the key image of rain “without melancholy” and the updated motif of the raven. Finally, it discusses the detachment of the speaker from what goes on in the poem – the speaker in the poem is different from the subject affected by emotions and moods modelled in the lines. The reading grasps Válek’s poem and sophisticated subversive deconstruction of the traditional model of symbolic poem concerned with romantic love.

This article explores the possible influence between certain works by Robert Browning and Edgar Allan Poe, composed and published very close in time, which deal with similar themes and share literary strategies and techniques. Although the possibility that they might have been reading each other’s work is supported by their respective correspondences with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the similarities between their works could also be attributed to literary experimentation as a means of standing out in a fiercely competitive literary market that had to pander to both popular and critical taste. This article compares the similarities in choice of tone and sensational event, as well as the use of voice in a short list of titles that coincide in both time of publication and topic, to raise the issue of influence in a controversial historical context when plagiarism and radical innovation were equally problematic.

This article suggests that the rise of the new journalism of the penny press during the antebellum America constituted an inescapable reference point and challenge for Poe and Hawthorne, for its emergence radically transformed the context and the course of the early phases of their careers and needs to be examined as a fundamental component of their literary visions. To illustrate that, the article focuses on the ways in which the penny press reverberates in Hawthorne’s and Poe’s fictional temporalities. In fact, their works seem to respond to the new regimes of time that were being introduced by the rise of daily newspaper that was booming in the 1830s, forming the framework within which the two writers’ construction of their authorial figures took shape. Centering primarily on the writings of the early phase of their careers, the article retraces the repeated and central appearances that news and the newspaper make in the writings of Hawthorne and Poe, suggesting how their responses to the manifold temporalities in which they were imbricated were key to the development of their different literary conceptions and authorial figures.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar las directrices de la composición literaria de cuentos adoptadas por Adolfo Bioy Casares. Para eso, se evalúan los tránsitos del escritor por los proyectos estéticos de Edgar Allan Poe y Antón Chéjov, que, desde las perspectivas de Charles Kiefer y Ricardo Piglia, consisten en referencias nucleares para la escritura del cuento a partir del siglo XIX. A partir del examen de los movimientos emprendidos por Bioy Casares entre las premisas adoptadas por Poe y Chéjov, se sustenta que el argentino acaba por delinear lo que se denomina como una poética portulana del cuento.

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In my discussion of a selection of Poe's tales, I intend to reveal the latent Kleinian dynamics which abound in texts that pivot on the dialectic between aggression and reparation: the narrative can be thought of as negotiating the representation of phantasies which are deployed to avoid intolerable anxiety, requiring most often than not a withdrawal from reality. The texts under analysis seem to play out with acute awareness the pain of fragmentation and disintegration and the ambivalent phantasies arising from the need to mitigate the pain of the internal situation. Poe's characters' traumatic encounters will foreground the struggle, fraught with ambivalence, to separate from and discern that which is other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of my article is to familiarise the reader with the notions of ‘non-linear temporality’ and ‘non-linear temporal experience.’ Based on studies of memory and neurobiology, I would like to highlight that episodic memory is a narrative process, and the past-present-future trichotomy is a bias, which can be overruled in so-called ‘non-neurotypical’ states of mind, such as trauma-induced shock and psychological illness. Edgar Allan Poe’s characters often present symptoms of psychological illnesses undefined in the early/mid-19th century with surprising accuracy, among them displaying common symptoms of NLTE (Non-Linear Temporal Experience). I aim to outline how these experiences are manifest in the particular context of his short fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miscelánea: A Journal of English & American Studies is the property of Miscelanea: A Journal of English & American Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1928, filmmaker Jean Epstein produced La Chute de la Maison Usher: a masterpiece of Gothic cinema. It is an adaptation of two of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Oval Portrait”. The study of this intersection of Jean Epstein and Edgar Allan Poe has led to the production of a triptych (a suite of three films): I Work for the Devil, Tonight You Belong to Me, and The Night-Side of Nature. The project explores a theory-in-action known as “photogénie”, and how this method might be used and updated to invigorate experimental cinema in the twenty-first century.

Apresento uma versão atualizada de minha tradução do poema The Raven, de Edgar Allan Poe, para o português brasileiro, acompanhada de um estudo teórico sobre as concepções que nortearam a prática e amparada por comentários referentes às escolhas criativas desse processo. Abro a discussão com a debatida questão da intraduzibilidade na poesia; prossigo com os conceitos de “transcriação” e “paramorfia”, conforme propostos por Haroldo de Campos; por fim, retomo os conceitos expostos para evidenciá-los nos poemas The Raven e O Corvo, especialmente no que diz respeito a como os padrões rítmicos, rímicos e aliterativos são determinantes para a construção de sentidos do poema. Comento escolhas pontuais feitas no processo de transcriação do poema, com atenção extra aos efeitos de sentido paronomásticos entre Lenore – nevermore e Raven – never e ponderando as escolhas de algumas traduções anteriores. Defendo que a postura criativa na tradução de poesia é determinante para a potencialização de efeitos que fogem à dimensão semântica dos poemas.

An American icon, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is famed for his fiendish tales of fear and trembling, and premature burial. He is less well known as a businessperson, let alone a marketing thought leader. Poe, though, was not only an entrepreneurially inclined self-promoter of genius, but he practised prescient marketing principles that are pertinent to present circumstances. In a world where dark tourism, dead celebrities and disinterred brands loom large, Poe's principal principles - perversity, poetry, plagiary, plasticity - are prior portents of marketing precepts. Written in an appropriately literary style, this paper shows that dead men do foretell tales. Of markets dreary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revenge is the theme and purpose of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog.” This tale of an enslaved jester who burns his captors alive during a courtly masquerade doubles as a tirade against the exploitative magazine owners, greedy editors, and literary cabals Poe battled throughout his career. Given its blunt biographical overtones and sensationalism, “Hop-Frog” has been considered a minor entry in Poe’s canon. This article suggests otherwise by tracing two unexplored dimensions of the story: first, Poe’s fattist depiction of the ruling class—aligned with his satirical works and the historical origins of fat-shaming in the United States; and secondly, a setting and plot that mimic through their design several technological innovations in vogue during the first half of the nineteenth century, most notably the internal combustion engine. By mechanizing revenge, Poe asserts the superiority of ingenious contraptions over lazy flesh, efficiency over accumulation. Anointing Hop-Frog/himself master of the machine, he imagines a model of literary production that only authors control and refine, in the same way that engineers strived for engines that would accomplish more with less. This model, I contend, finds artistic creation and technological prototyping converging in the antebellum imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rudyard Kipling asserted that he had included a 'cryptogram' in his book 'Rewards and Fairies' (1910). This has so far gone unsolved, and indeed undetected. I present the known information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a story entitled “Le chevalier double” and published in 1840, Théophile Gautier stages the duel between a medieval knight and his double, who represents a part of himself, a diabolical part whose origin lies in a mysterious adultery. Hovering between the fairy tale and the fantastic, this story is contemporary to Poe’s “William Wilson”, and echoes some earlier works, by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Washington Irving in particular, but also draws on a more distant tradition which dates back to seventeenth-century Spain. Poe and Gautier gave different results and meanings to the duels of their characters: this paper proposes a reflection on this difference, and more generally on the theme of the duel with the double. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on literature's potential for healing – both medical and sociopolitical – in times of severe crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Affect is an important literary tool to make people aware of social inequalities, in particular reading or writing short stories with the experience of a simultaneous real-life pandemic. Reading is an embodied act through which the reader enters into a dialogue with both the author and the text. Emotions emerge that are often more deeply stored in memory than the words as such, and that changes our perception of the world. This effect is also encapsulated in Siri Hustvedt's analysis of reading practices, Sara Ahmed's affect theory and Rita Felski's four ways of engaging with texts. I analyse John O'Hara's short story 'The Doctor's Son' (1935), situated in rural Pennsylvania at the time of the 1918 Influenza, and Victor LaValle's 'Recognition' (2020), resonating with the COVID-19 pandemic in an isolated apartment building in New York City. Both stories question the concept of pandemics as the great levellers by pointing out social injustice due to class and ethnic hierarchies. Taking Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death' (1842) and Poe's emphasis on the preconceived and single effect of fear and subsequent horror caused by the 'Red/Black Death', as a starting point, the article presents O'Hara's story as a manifestation of the medical, social and ethnic phenomena at work in 1918: social distancing, facial masks, closed public institutions, people's resistance to these measures and medical treatment along ethnic and class lines. LaValle's 'Recognition' allows readers a glimpse into the relationship between an unnamed African American woman, who is also the narrator, and Pilar, a Colombian American woman, who dies of the virus. As part of a contemporary Decameron project, 'Recognition' stresses the human need for community, communication and, thus mutual human recognition, giving the dead – whether rich or poor – a name and demanding to undo systemic social inequalities. In that sense, literature can heal the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention to the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect.