The cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe: towards a feminist remodelling of (meta)history.

Kokoli, Alexandra

Abstract

Angela Carter's 1982 short story "The cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" is a fictional biographical account of the development and "coming to writing" of the author named in the title, while also paying tribute to Poe's poetics of the short story. The influence in Carter’s writing of Poe’s reform of the gothic genre is well documented and will not be examined in the present article. Instead, “The Cabinet” is here deployed as an exemplary textual illustration of an emergent model for writing of (literary) histories from a specifically second-wave feminist perspective. In Carter’s fictional reconstruction of Poe’s life and work, the maternal element features in more ways than one, in the flesh (as Elizabeth Poe, Edgar’s actress mother) but also, notably, as a spectre (as Elizabeth’s ghost, but also partially and imperfectly em-“bodied” in the face of Edgar’s child-bride Virginia.

Citation

KOKOLI, A. 2002. The cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe: towards a feminist remodelling of (meta)history. In-between: essays and studies in literary criticism, 11(1), pages 55-70.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 31, 2002
• Online Publication Date: Mar 31, 2002
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2002
• Deposit Date: May 21, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: May 21, 2010
• Journal: In-between: essays and studies in literary criticism
• Print ISSN: 0971-9474
• Publisher: G.R. Taneja
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 55-70
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/489