Abstract
In America, Gothic Romanticism was received in a spirit which reflected both the distance that separated the consciousness of the New World from the cultural history of Europe, and the fascination which that half-possessed inheritance exerted upon the American soul. Harry Levin has argued, in The Power of Blackness, that the overt ideals of nineteenth-century American society, the belief in material progress and human perfectibility, the ‘bland perfection’ of Americans’ daylight selves, were offset by a compensating visitation of darkness and insecurity in the night-side of the nation’s collective psyche. Creative minds were drawn to this neglected or repressed dark component: ‘Where the voice of the majority is by definition affirmative, the spirit of independence is likeliest to manifest itself by employing the negative’1 That negative is most memorably voiced in the melancholy reiteration of Edgar Allan Poe’s hauntingly insistent Raven: ‘Nevermore.’
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Notes to Chapter 6: Edgar Allan Poe
Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (London and New York, 1958; paperback edn 1960) p. 7.
In Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London, 1908; 1962 reprint) pp. 21–30.
See Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford, 1985; paperback edn 1987) p.155.
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© 1990 John Herdman
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Herdman, J. (1990). Edgar Allan Poe. In: The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371637_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371637_6
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