A World of Words offers a new look at the degree to which language itself is a topic of Poe's texts. Stressing the ways his fiction reflects on the nature of its own signifying practices, Williams sheds new light on such issues as Poe's characterization of the relationship between author and reader as a struggle for authority, on his awareness of the displacement of an "authorial writing self" by a "self as it is written," and on his debunking of the redemptive properties of the romantic symbol.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- I “A World of Words”
- II “The Personage in Question”: Self and Language
- III “An Unknown Quantity of X”: Some Anxieties of Authority
- IV “Duelli Lex Scripta, et Non, Aliterque”: The Struggle for Authority
- V “Word of No Meaning”: Denial of the Symbol
- VI Voice and Text: Displacements of Authority
- VII Conclusion: Allegories of Reading
- Notes
- Index
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