Textual projections: The emergence of a postcolonial American Gothic

This study traces a specific psychological thread through the works of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and H. P. Lovecraft to reveal one particular source of America's emergent gothic literature. Working within a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework that provides a point of engagement with narratives of American postcolonial experiences, the arc of this study moves through the Nineteenth Century, from Irving to Lovecraft, focusing on the psychological angst of America's condition as an emerging postcolonial nation.; Chapter Two examines the seeds of American gothic writing by looking at Irving's most famous stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," in their original context of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Irving's treatment of the landscape lays the foundation for what Victoria Nelson terms a "psychotopography" of a postcolonial America.; Chapter Three considers this foundation taken to its abstract extreme in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, culminating with a look at his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe employs word play and geographical abstraction to manifest the expression of a conflicted postcolonial personal self-narrativization.; Chapter Four analyzes the manner in which Nathaniel Hawthorne confronts the intersection of both his personal and national genealogies. Through his short fiction such as "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Alice Doane's Appeal," and "The Custom House" introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne obscures the boundaries between historical, psychological, and fictional narrative.; Chapter Five continues to examine Hawthorne's psychotopography in his "Legends of the Province House" and The House of the Seven Gables . One sees how Hawthorne textually wanders through the history of America, finding a fragmented, conflicted, and gothic-influenced collection of ambivalent signification.; Chapter Six examines the psychotopography of an abstracted and unnamed New York as Melville presents it in his novel Pierre. Melville uses New York City as a geographical topos as he reconceptualizes the patricidal narrative on the level of an imagined individual history.; Chapter Seven delves into the serpiginous psychotopography of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" showing how through the body of his tales he attacks history and postcolonial significations. Building on the psychotopographies of his literary predecessors, he culminates the work begun by Irving and truly modernizes the American Gothic.