Throughout the first half of the 19th century, America gazed at itself in a mirror and saw
that it was good. As a beacon for democracy, the United States appeared to shine bright as the
light of the world, demonstrating through the 1828 election of President Andrew Jackson that
even a commoner from the countryside had the potential to rise to the top of the political
hierarchy. On another level, under the growing success and influence of the Industrial
Revolution, the American people seemed to ascribe widely to the belief that nature could be
conquered by man, that no danger posed by the natural world was beyond the salvation offered
by human technology. And then there was the overarching vision of manifest destiny, the
nation’s blessed calling to expand its territory from ocean to ocean and thereby fulfill its purpose
as a paradigm of virtue amid the savagery of the New World. Beneath the surface of each
favorable reflection, however, lay shadows of hypocrisy that casted silent judgment upon these
shining images of prosperity: the fact that democracy empowered the people, but only if they
were white males; the reality that with industrial progress came egalitarian regress; and the truth
that manifest destiny served as but an imperialist justification, a sort of divine mandate, for the
removal and massacre of countless Native Americans.
This tension between negative undertone and positive façade, between dark realities and
their euphemized reflections, created a critical dissonance in the 19th century American
conscience, such that the nation appeared ostensibly promising on the surface, and yet remained
ravaged by storms of contradiction underneath. Perhaps inspired by this internal struggle
between delusion...
... middle of paper ...
...nly reality within the mind of the person.
Works Cited
Fisher, Benjamin F. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print.
Gargano, James W. “’The Black Cat’: Perverseness Reconsidered.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe’s Tales. Ed. William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971. 87-94. Print.
Hammond, J.R. Edgar Allan Poe Companion: The Short Stories. London: MacMillan Press, 1981. Print.
Jones, Paul Christian. “Slavery and Abolition.” Edgar Allan Poe in Context. Ed. Kevin A. Hayes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. 138-147. Print.
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Robinson, E. Arthur. “Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’” Critics on Poe. Ed. David B. Kesterson. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973. 107-115. Print.
Kennedy, Gerald J. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001
Expansionism in the late 19th/ Early 20th century Expansionism in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century shared many similarities and differences to that of previous American expansionist ideals. In both cases of American expansionism, the Americans believed that we must expand our borders in order to keep the country running upright. Also, the Americans believed that the United States was the strongest of nations, and that they could take any land they pleased. This is shown in the "manifest destiny" of the 1840's and the "Darwinism" of the late 1800's and early 1900's. Apart from the similarities, there were also several differences that included the American attempt to stretch their empire across the seas and into other parts of the world.
Approaching the mid-1800’s, a movement coined as “Manifest Destiny” took over the American nation. Manifest Destiny was the overall idea that Americans had the “divine right” to expand towards the west. Many reasons were considered when talking about settling west, reasons such as cheap land, economic growth, and job opportunities, etc. Americans wanted to expand the national territory from ocean to ocean and express their superiority. Overall, the purpose of Manifest Destiny was to spread American values and expand the geographical borders of the nation.
Jones, P.C., ‘Slavery and Abolitionism’, In Edgar Allan Poe in Context, Hayes, K.J. (ed.), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Manifest destiny is the idea that Americans had, and have, the inherent right to expand the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. As we know, this eventually happened, but it took a lot of time, money, blood, and effort in order to achieve this divine goal. We take for granted the size and span of our country, when for a good part of the 19th century, we shared the land mass with Spanish Mexico. It’s important to understand what drove us to pursue this goal, and the struggles that we encountered in obtaining, exploring, and settling the land.
In "The House of Poe", Richard Wilbur elucidates his criticisms of Poe 's work. He firstly comments on a critic 's purpose, then how Poe 's stories are all allegories. He then addresses the possible opposition to his argument, and then begins his discussion of the common themes in Poe 's writing and provides examples from his stories. This dissertation will analyze Wilbur 's criticism by cross referencing Poe 's work and how it exemplifies Wilbur 's assessment. There is a great deal of evidence to support Wilbur 's theories, but a close examination of each one will determine how legitimate his argument really is.
Poe, Edgar A. "The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.” University of Virginia, 2009. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. .
The two short stories that I have chosen by Edgar Allan Poe are The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat. These two stories in particular have many things in common as far as technique goes, but they do have some significant differences between the two. In this paper I will try to compare and contrast these two short stories and hopefully bring something to the readers attention that wasn't there at first.
MAnifest claimed that America had a destiny, manifest, i.e., self-evident, from God to occupy the North American continent south of Canada.Both the Spanish and the French monarchs authorized and financed exploration of the “New World” because, among other things, they considered it their divinely appointed mission to spread Christianity to the New World by converting the natives to Christianity. Coming later to the venture, the British and especially the New England Puritans carried with them a demanding sense of Providential purpose.Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place, Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to emulate. “Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission.” Such are the basic outlines of the idea of America’s “chosenness” and providential destiny and mission that not only underlay the invocation of the nation’s “Manifest Destiny” as the rationale for the United States to extend its boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. It is also the constellation of ideas that has informed American nationalism and its actions at home and abroad to this
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Internet.
“The Black Cat”, written by Edgar A. Poe, has been called “one of the most powerful of Poe’s stories” with a horrific element that just barely “stops short of the wavering line of disgust”. Originally published in 1843 in the United States Saturday Post, this Gothic tale is perhaps also one of Poe’s most extensively analyzed pieces. (Cambell33) Much diversity is seen in the interpretations offered. The black cats are variously conceptualized as symbolic of the narrator’s wife, manifesting the supernatural, representing the narrator’s “intemperance and lost docility”, and reflecting some rapidly diminishing noble facet of the tale-teller’s character or conscience. The narrator himself is described by various analysts as insane, a liar, and
Draper, James P., ed. "Poe." World Literature Criticism. Vol. 4. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992. Print.
Simons, Julian. The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. Print.
Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale, "The Black Cat," is a disturbing story that delves into the contrasts between reality and fantasy, insanity and logic, and life and death. To decipher one distinct meaning presented in this story undermines the brilliance of Poe's writing. Multiple meanings can be derived from "The Black Cat," which lends itself perfectly to many approaches of critical interpretation.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th ed. New York: Longman, 1999. 33-37.