Romanticism And The Postmodern Tendency In Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin Stories

Edgar Allan Poe was involved in an endless search for truth in all his works, and there was no exception when he wrote his three Dupin detective stories set in France. Poe thus became the father of the detective story, which anticipated both the great British detective writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the genre of detective fiction as a whole. From the perspective of the classical detective story, Poe can be made to look like a Rationalist rather than a Romantic.Yet Poe lived in the Romantic period of American culture with the incredible flowering of many masterpieces by Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and some other great Romantic writers. Being a Romanticist himself, he was a critic of the Enlightenment, the influential system of rational thought that had developed in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. From this Enlightenment arose all the modern sciences, and the whole system is sometimes referred to as Western thought.This thesis is based on the detailed textual analysis of Poe's three Dupin detective stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." By taking the Romantic view of duality into consideration, the thesis aims to illustrate Poe's ambivalent attitude towards Romanticism regarding both the search for truth and the existence of truth itself, while also seeing how it strikes an affinity with recent postmodern thinking. From the perspective of the search for truth, both the rational and the irrational play important roles in solving the mysteries, as does the crucial ingredient of the will as the partner of the imagination. Furthermore, unlike the construction of truth in writing poetry, it seems that Poe attempts to use both the scientific and the poetic method to build objective truth in his Dupin stories.However, Poe goes far beyond the confines of our limited understanding of him as a Romantic writer. His ambivalence toward the Romantic ideology leads us to discover the "decenteredness" of his Dupin texts and his skeptical attitude towards truth, two of the most striking characteristics of postmodernism. The correspondence of Poe's Dupin stories with the postmodernist theory constitutes one of the most unique and timeless qualities of Poe's literary creation, which in turn has enabled him to constantly revisit our modern art and aesthetics.