The hero in time: The American Gothic fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville

By exploring narrative technique, this study describes the discursive practice of American Gothic fiction in order to define an indigenous American narrative form. The dissertation compares the work of Brown, Poe and Melville with British and European counterparts, and has three aims: to assess the discursive texture of American Gothic; to trace its genesis from early American Puritan spiritual autobiography and Indian captivity narratives; and to produce a definition of the term "American Gothic.".;Chapter One makes a distinction between British and American Gothic, concentrating on spatial and temporal narrative elements. Chapter Two examines early American narratives as they treat the ordeal of "coming over" from Britain. The last three chapters take up individual authors: Chapter Three covers Brown's novels; Chapter Four treats a range of Poe's work, including short stories, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, and Eureka; Chapter Five considers Melville's work after Moby-Dick as philosophical versions of American Gothic.;My methods include Gerard Genette's structural categories along with Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological procedures. While thematic criticism is considered, this study avoids psychological, symbolic readings of American Gothic. Instead, it finds the "Gothic" of Brown, Poe and Melville to be not a subject, but rather a purpose served by a technique best described as phenomenological. These works have in common, besides the Gothic settings transformed from British Gothic, a perspective of wonder in the face of an unstructured American landscape.;This study argues that the American version of Gothic terror--aroused not by supernatural activity, but rather by enactment of discursive temporality--originated in a type of narrative practised from the beginnings of American writing. Since William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, American discourse has approached the terrifying with an awe-stricken passivity, at the same time its narrators have attempted to control that experience by the act of writing. Several early American genres, then, create a national rhetoric in which confrontation with the empty spaces of America promotes a desire to give pattern to unstructured experience. The result, in both early American genres and in later Gothic fiction, is a specifically American approach to narrative in which phenomena over time refuses "novelistic," spatial, structuring.