Poe, Edgar Allan - Judith E. Pike (essay date 1998)
Judith E. Pike (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: Pike, Judith E. “Poe and the Revenge of the Exquisite Corpse.” Studies in American Fiction 26, no. 2 (autumn 1998): 171-92.
[In the following essay, Pike analyzes Poe's preoccupation with death and the “fetishism of the exquisite corpse” during the nineteenth century.]
Although Poe's debt to the Gothic genre is documented in his tales with numerous references to Gothic texts and occult literature, Poe's “architecture of death”1 is not merely a case of belated romanticism.2 The resurgence of the Gothic architectures of death in Poe should instead be read as a literary response to cultural attempts to raze those very structures and replace them with a new ideology of death. By Poe's time, death was being sublimated by a whole new industry and aesthetic of mourning, which in effect commercialized and domesticated death. Although numerous cultural historians have...
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