| Contents: |
Introduction -- Chronology -- Chapter 1. Edgar Allan Poe's Background -- 1. The Life of Edgar Allan ... Poe / Eric W. Carlson -- Poe's personal instability, rooted in his family life, contrasted with his discipline as a writer. -- 2. The Sources of Poe's Youthful Despair / Jeffrey Meyers -- The poverty, death, and neglect that Poe experienced in his childhood wounded him psychologically, leading to his self-destructiveness and irresponsibility in the early 1830s. -- 3. Poe's Derangement in the Late 1840s / Scott Peeples -- After his wife, Virginia's death, Poe's derangement led to hallucinations and paranoia, which drove away everyone who had once supported him. -- Chapter 2. Social and Psychological Disorder in Poe's Works -- 1. Poe's Characters as Self-Portraits / Claudia C. Morrison -- Ligeia may represent the women in Poe's life (his mother, for instance) who had died but are presented here as determined to return to him, bringing dread and horror. -- 2. Madness as Realism, Not Supernaturalism / Vincent Buranelli -- Most of Poe's murderers should be in mental institutions instead of prisons. -- 3. Edgar Allan Poe's and the Insanity Plea / John Cleman -- As Poe was writing The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Imp of the Perverse, two court cases raised the issue of the treatment of the insane and the responsibility they bear for their crimes. -- 4. Abnormality and the Confusion of Life and Death / Charles E. May -- Obsession in The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell-Tale Heart, which lead to gruesome murders, arises from a failure to separate life from death. The live burials in these tales support this idea. -- 5. Madness in Poe's Tales as a Means of Escape / Daniel Hoffman -- Poe's disturbed protagonists develop split personalities and hypersensitivity as a means of escaping reality. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the protagonist seeks to neutralize patriarchal disapproval. -- 6. Confessing Shrewdness to Deny Madness in Poe's Stories / Christopher Benfey -- The narrators of Poe's tales attempt to prove that they are perfectly sane by explaining the care and attention to detail that they used to carry out their atrocities. -- 7. The Mad Chamber of the Mind in Poe's Poetry / Benjamin F. Fisher -- Poe's poems are psychological journeys into the mind. The chamber in The Raven is the protagonist's mind. -- 8. Death, Sex, and Horror in Poe's Poetry / Edward H. Davidson -- The Protagonists of Poe's poetry typically arise from death, horror, and madness to know a greater truth. -- 9. Insanity as the Way to Salvation in The Pit and the Pendulum / James Lundquist -- As sense after sense is taken away, the character in The Pit and the Pendulum loses his will and sanity. Only then does the hand reach out to save him. -- 10. Poe's Fixation on the Death of Beautiful Women / Karen Weekes -- Poe's acknowledged belief that the most poetic subject on earth was the death of a beautiful woman is carried through in the tales with the murderous obsession of his characters. -- 11. Ligeia as a Tale of Obsession and Hallucination / Roy P. Basler -- The narrator hallucinates the return of Ligeia into the body of his murdered wife, Rowena, to give himself, he believes, power over death. -- Chapter 3. Contemporary Instances of Death and Abnormal Psychology -- 1. The Obsession of the Stalker / Kathleen Megan -- The Slaying of Johanna Justin-Jinich brought into the open the fear that many women have of deranged stalkers. -- 2. Patricide Without Remorse / Manuel Roig-Franzia -- Recalling several of Poe's stories, a court case brings up a son's motiveless murder of his father thirty years previously. -- 3. Journey of a Schizophrenic / Elyn R. Saks -- A schizophrenic, now a university law professor, details the symptoms of her disorder at a time in law school when she decided to stop taking her medications. -- 4. The Insanity Defense / Lara Bricker -- The insanity defense has been employed in trials such as that of Sheila LaBarre, who believed she was an angel sent by God to kill her two lovers. Juries, however, rarely find killers not guilty by reason of insanity. -- For Further Discussion -- For Further Reading -- Bibliography -- Index Read More |
Add to basket
Permalink
Disable Highlighting
Book
(c2010.)