Poe's ＂Thingum Bob＂ and Its Historical Context

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The dominant psychoanalytic tradition in Poe criticism has sought to find out the pathological cause of Poe’s aberrant personality and diseased fantasies, disregarding the specificities of the historical, economic, political, and social context that informs the author’s creative activity. Poe’s 1844 short story, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. Late Editor of the ‘Goosetherumfoodle’ by Himself,” has been analyzed in psychoanalytic terms. Emphasizing Poe’s early life in Richmond and his unhappy relations with John Allan, psychoanalytic critics have focused on uncovering Poe’s hatred for his father and the unconscious Oedipal revenge implicitly acted out in his fictional text. Departing from the traditional psychoanalytic tradition, I will demonstrate in this study that Poe’s satirical piece, “Thingum Bob,” cannot be appropriately understood without reference to its complex socio-historical context. I will situate Poe’s “Thingum Bob” in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century literary conditions including the birth of the professional author, the emergence of publishing as a formidable business, and the literary conflicts between Poe and the influential New England literary cliques. In so doing, I will demonstrate that Poe’s “Thingum Bob” was conditioned not only by the writer’s pure artistic imagination alone, but also by his constant literary relations and struggles with the publishing world in the first decades of the nineteenth-century America.

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