Browsing by Subject "Edgar Allan Poe"
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Item Blackening Character, Imagining Race, and Mapping Morality: Tarring and Feathering in Nineteenth Century American Literature(2013-08-05) Trninic, MarinaThis study examines the ritual of tarring and feathering within specific American cultural contexts and literary works of the nineteenth-century to show how the discourse surrounding the actual and figurative practice functioned as part of a larger process of discursive and visual racialization. The study illustrates how the practice and discourse of blackening white bodies enforced embodiment, stigmatized imagined interiority, and divorced the victims from inalienable rights. To be tarred and feathered was to be marked as anti-social, duplicitous and even anarchic. The study examines the works of major American authors including John Trumbull, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, analyzing how their works evidence a larger national conflation of character, race, and morality. Sometimes drawing on racial imagery implicitly, and sometimes engaging in the issues of race and slavery explicitly, their works feature tarring and feathering to portray their anxieties about social coercion and victimization in the context of the ?experiment? of democracy. Trumbull?s mock-epic genre satirizes the plight of the Tory and diminishes the forms of the revolution; Cooper?s novel works as a rhetorical vehicle to prevent a perceived downfall of the republic; the short fiction of Poe exaggerates the horror of uneven and racialized power relations; and Hawthorne?s body of work ironizes the original parody of tar and feathers to expose the violent nature of democratic foundation. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach, this first, in-depth study of tarring and feathering in America reveals that the ritual is a fertile ground for understanding the multivalent social constructs of the time. Examining tarring and feathering incidents can tell scholars about the status of racial feeling, moral values (including sexual and gender norms), and economic fissures of the context in which they occur. Abjecting the body of the victim, the act rewrites the individual?s relationship to the body politic, and the performance of the ritual reveals the continuously emergent, publically sanctioned forms of belonging to the community and the nation. Moreover, examining the representation of tarring and feathering can tell scholars about an author?s relationship to the ideology of an American way.Item Midnight drearies : three moods on Edgar Allan Poe(2012-12) Davis, Andrew Delamater; Sharlat, Yevgeniy; Welcher, DanEdgar Allan Poe has long been considered one of the great writers in Gothic literature. His works, as he himself suggested in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” are intended to strike a unique balance between mainstream appeal and higher literary craft. In many ways, my goals as a composer are similar, not just in mitigating this often tenuous dynamic, but also in tapping into powerful emotional states. Poe is a master at creating moods, for instantly drawing the reader into his dynamic worlds. Many of his works spend a significant amount of time, sometimes paragraph upon paragraph as in the opening to The Fall of the House of Usher, simply detailing his specific vision of the story’s tenor. In this piece, I was interested in musically depicting the imagery, which Poe so eloquently writes. I have chosen three of Poe’s short stories: The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Fall of the House of Usher. In each movement, I deliberately avoid any programmatic connection to the story, that is to say specific events in the music do not coincide with any actual depiction of an event within the intended story. Rather this piece examines and details the specific tone of each story. Midnight Drearies: Three Moods on Edgar Allan Poe was written for Dan Welcher and the University of Texas New Music Ensemble.Item Reading the city : an examination of the parallels between Charles Meryon's Eaux-fortes sur Paris and the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe(2014-05) Abare, Sarah Catherine; Charlesworth, Michael, 1955-Charles Meryon is considered to be among the most skilled etchers in the history of French printmaking. Born in 1821, Meryon reached professional maturity during the French etching revival. His most ambitious and well-known project is his Eaux-fortes sur Paris (1850-1854), a suite of 22 etchings comprising twelve large views of Parisian landmarks and ten smaller prints of poems and other images. What is perhaps most remarkable about Meryon's representations of Paris is that they seem to show objective, detailed views of the city while also conveying the artist's subjective, uncanny perceptions of it. This tension between the real and the metaphysical is often interpreted as an indication of Meryon's mental illness, which was well known by critics of his time. One of the most frequently touched on but least developed themes in the scholarship on Meryon is his connection with Edgar Allan Poe, who was widely read and embraced in France beginning in the 1840s. The first French translation of Poe's work was published in 1844 and by the time that Meryon began the Eaux-Fortes suite, several of Poe's short stories had been translated in French journals and newspapers. Meryon began the suite in 1850, just a year after Poe's death, and had completed at least the first state of all of the etchings by 1854. Meryon's suite, like Poe's tales, has an ominous mood and, when considered as a whole, tells a story of a city haunted by corruption and evil and by its own history. In his depictions of the city's architecture and landscape, Meryon penetrates beneath Paris's surface into what he sees as its character and his treatment of his subject aligns closely with Edgar Allan Poe's representations of the modern world. The urban environment's metaphysical underpinnings that are evident in Meryon's Eaux-Fortes sur Paris merit a thorough examination, and a consideration of Meryon's representation in conjunction with Edgar Allan Poe's tales that were popular in France during the years in which Meryon was working makes it possible to put Meryon's work and his perceptions of Paris into a larger context.