
The Porous Sanctuary
Art and Anxiety in Poe's Short Fiction
William Freedman(Author)
Peter Lang Verlag
Will be published approx. on 29. November 2002
Book
Hardback
155 pages
978-0-8204-5181-7 (ISBN)
Description
The Porous Sanctuary argues that the resistance to interpretation discovered by increasingly frequent deconstructive readings of Poe's short fictions can be interpreted psychologically rather than deconstructively. The various strategies of obfuscation and evasion, conscious or otherwise, that permeate the texts serve to obscure intimidating realities typically associated with woman and the female body, which the narratives glimpse and recoil from. For Poe, art was a sanctuary from such unpalatable realities, but it was a porous one, relentlessly invaded by what it was designed to exclude. The tales, self-reflexive in this sense, typically narrate the struggle between the autotelic insularity of the work of art and the assaults of a menacing reality upon its penetrable walls.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 23 cm
Width: 16 cm
Weight
360 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8204-5181-7 (9780820451817)
Schweitzer Classification
Person
The Author: William Freedman is Professor of English Literature at the University of Haifa in Israel, where he has lived and taught since 1969. He is the author of two previous books, Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel and More Than a Pastime: An Oral History of Baseball Fans; fifty essays of literary criticism and theory; and poetry published in some four dozen poetry journals and magazines.