A Study Of Orientalism In Edgar Allan Poe’s Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the eminent representatives in the nineteenth-century American literature.Poe was a master of exotic motifs,especially the Orient ones which merit critical attention.Anchored in his social and cultural milieu,Poe’s Oriental preoccupation was neither singular nor accidental.Around the nineteenth century,Orientomania was sweeping Western countries,including the United States,an emerging country which aspired to construct its unique Orientalist discourses.As the standard-bearers of American Renaissance,Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman promoted the formation of American nationhood by representing and manipulating the abstract and silenced Orient.Their narrative strategies to a large extent followed the East-versus-West dialectics and helped construct American Orientalist discourses.Meanwhile,Poe has also seized the historically favorable opportunity not only to incorporate Oriental knowledge into his own theoretical and experimental framework,but also to question,re-examine,subvert,and even deconstruct the dominant discourses,thereby demonstrating his deep and complicated thought.Revolving around A Tale of the Ragged Mountains and Some Words with a Mummy,this thesis tries to conduct a comparatively systematic analysis of Poe’s Orientalism and consequently reveal the subversive discourses behind Poe’s parody and irony.In A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,Poe creates a world of doubles to connect the present with the past,the national with the exotic,and above all,the Self with the Other,thus re-imagining the Orientalist Myth of the Repressed "Indians".In this sense,Poe’s borrowings from other texts are not piratical but parodic since they are discursively aimed at subverting the dominant ideology.Some Words with a Mummy helps disclose the abuse and oppression inherent in Orientalization.By granting autonomy and discursive power to the Other,Poe realizes both demystification of American progressivism and subversion of the East-versus-West dialectics.Meanwhile,Poe levels criticism at Logos,the very foundation of the Orientalist discursive system.By affrming writing,the tale basically reverses and deconstructs Logocentrism since Socrates’s time.Nevertheless,Poe’s representation of the Orient also follows a complicated and even contradictory trajectory.Poe’s Orient is essentially the represented Other.Furthermore,Poe’s perception of the Orient has hinged upon Western writings,which could fundamentally be the deciding factor for the coincidence between his Orientalism and the dominant ideology.By virtue of the aforementioned consideration,it is necessary to adopt a critical stance and a deconstructive gesture toward Poe’s Orientalism whose essence should be preserved and dross discarded.