“The Gold-Bug,” Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination

  • Lawrence Frank
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture book series (PNWC)

Abstract

In the universe of pure contingency depicted in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) there is only — history. Once the universe is denied design and purpose through the skeptical implications of the nebular hypothesis, the human situation and the mysteries that constitute it are to be understood only through the reconstruction of those contingent events that have led to the present moment, for example, to the murders of Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye. The fictional detective becomes a practitioner of those historical disciplines — philology, geology, and archaeology — that were in the process of consolidation in the middle of the nineteenth century both in Britain and in the United States, often under the figurative aegis of Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, a feat announced to the world in his famous 50-page letter to M. Dacier that was read before the Académie Française on 27 September 1822.1

Keywords

Natural Theology Egyptian Antiquity Historical Imagination Historical Discipline Tulip Tree 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
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© Lawrence Frank 2003

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  • Lawrence Frank

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