Edgar A. Poeの文学的環境について

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In my previous essay on Poe, which appeared in the issue before last of this periodical (Vol. 10, Nov. 1960), I attempted to discover the possible influence of the South of his time upon Poe as man and social critic, and made clear that he revealed various Southern traits in his manner, in his speech and in his temperament as well as in his ways of thoughts. I also maintained that Poe's social and political views more or less reflected those of the ruling classes of the conservative South, which were always suspicious of any influence from the North. In the present essay, I have made a further attempt to investigate the relation of Poe as writer to the intellectual or literary environment of the Virginia where he spent his formative years. I have proceeded from the assumed premises that Poe, being one of the shrewdest critics and most competent magazine editors of the day, cannot have been indifferent to the trends of contemporary literature, but that, on the contrary, he had a fairly wide acquaintance with it and with the chief literary figures of his time as well. As an editor of The Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond, he made it popular throughout the country, and The Messenger, in turn, played an important role in introducing European romanticism to the South. It is clear that Poe read widely English, French, German and Italian writers, and that his works mirrored the influence of a variety of romanticisms. For instance, the subjects and moods of the poems which appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger during the third and the fourth decades of the nineteenth century showed striking similarities to those of Poe's poems; moreover, both British and American magazines in those days abounded with stories which remarkably resembled the tales of Poe, some dealing with romantic theses with ancient and exotic backgrounds, and some, under the influence of a supernatural phase of German romanticism, having strains of the grotesque and the fantastic. Poe played an active part in stimulating a vogue for the Gothic and the bizarre, but a more important thing to notice is that he opened a new domain for the tales of the "terror of the soul," not for those of the "terror of Germany." For, while using most of the conventional properties of Gothic romance, he substituted pathology for ghosts and sorcery and, with his subtle analysis, explored the workings of the human soul in the processes of its disintegration. The tales of Poe, after all, seem to be the result of his careful analysis and synthesis of the British and American magazine fiction which was then in vogue. He was alert enough to sense what kind of fiction was most in demand by the magazines. In a letter to Thomas W. White, he mentioned the four types of stories which were most common, and a closer examination of Poe's own tales will prove at once that he wrote his stories by firmly adhering to these types. This fact, moreover, will suffice to show that Poe was not outside the currents of the literature of his time but that, on the contrary, he showed a lively interest in the actual conditions of the publishing world. In my opinion, Poe was not an alienated and erratic genius; he was surely a product of the literary world of his time, and everything he wrote sprang from the dominant literary mood and taste of his epoch. In the ante-bellum South of his time, as Van Wyck Brooks says, people were living "Gothically," and it was quite probable that the world of the mysterious and the horrible, of the marcabre and the fantasmagoric which Poe described had existed in the imagination of the people about him. There is certainly a Southern flavor in his sensibility, his imagination, and his sense of atmosphere and landscape as well as in his manner of writing. In spite of all this, however, he transcended his South and his time in a way, for his creation was quite his own, as were his tone, atmosphere, characters and landscape. His greatness consisted in creating an unsurpassed world of his own out of worn-out materials, which he skillfully combined, arranged, and wrought into finished and faultless works of art.
東京女子大学の論文

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江口裕子
東京女子大学

Edgar A. Poeの文学的環境について

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