While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. © Departamento de Literatura Española-Universidad de Sevilla.īringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. The article pays also due attention to the revelatory experience that results from crossing the boundary between the temporal and the eternal in Poe's "angelic" dialogues. The Dupin tales, in turn, are grounded in the cult of Night and in the initiatory powers of darkness, recalling the mystical "night of the soul." The two "landscape tales" depict the act of an artistic transcendence, performed by an artisan devoted to emulating the supernal order within the bounds of empirical reality. The article is devoted to the mystical elements and allusions surfacing in Poe's "analytical, "angelic," and "landscape" tales: "A Descent into the Maelström," "The Purloined Letter," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Domain of Arnheim," "Landor's Cottage," "Mesmeric Revelation," "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," and "The Power of Words." It is argued that the narrative circumstances in ""A Descent into the Maelström,"" in which the Norwegian fisherman describes to the unnamed narrator his adventure, rework the long-established spiritual imagery.
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