A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe

by Michael J. S. Williams

Overview

A World of Words offers a new look at the degree to which language itself is a topic of Poe's texts. Stressing the ways his fiction reflects on the nature of its own signifying practices, Williams sheds new light on such issues as Poe's characterization of the relationship between author and reader as a struggle for authority, on his awareness of the displacement of an "authorial writing self" by a "self as it is written," and on his debunking of the redemptive properties of the romantic symbol.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822381495
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	07/12/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	201
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)
File size:	561 KB

Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Preface
I “A World of Words”
II “The Personage in Question”: Self and Language
III “An Unknown Quantity of X”: Some Anxieties of Authority
IV “Duelli Lex Scripta, et Non, Aliterque”: The Struggle for Authority
V “Word of No Meaning”: Denial of the Symbol
VI Voice and Text: Displacements of Authority
VII Conclusion: Allegories of Reading
Notes
Index