Cartographies of the abyss: Tropics of sublimity in the fictions of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe

This thesis examines a number of major intersections between selected fictions of American authors Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe, arguing for the significant and often unrecognized importance of Brown's influence on Poe, and via Poe, on late nineteenth century literary Modernism. It approaches these interwoven fictions through their engagement with the philosophical discourse on the sublime, a discourse that emerged early in the eighteenth century and continued to exert a tremendous influence into the mid-nineteenth century. It argues for the importance of these fictions as pioneering proto-Modernist works due to their development of a literary aesthetic of complex indeterminacy. This indeterminate aesthetic is inextricably bound up with the critical investment in the sublime which these fictions share. This thesis also explores the connections between the sublime aesthetic of these fictions and their provocative scepticism toward dominant paradigms of Enlightenment thought, a scepticism which leads them to explore concepts which in the nineteenth century began to crystallize in the discursive creation of the unconscious. The first chapter focuses on Brown's novel Wieland in terms of its investigation of the relationship between religious inspiration and insanity through the rhetorical sublime. The second considers Brown's Edgar Huntly as a critique of the interlinked concepts of sympathy and sublimity, concepts which were central to the aesthetic and political discourse of the early United States. The third considers the continuation of this critique performed by Poe's only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and examines the ways in which this story borrows from and transforms Brown's treatment of the natural sublime in Edgar Huntly. The final chapter considers Poe's tale "The Fall of the House of Usher" as an incisive fictional critique of influential theories of the sublime, as articulated by Edmund Burke, James Usher, and Immanuel Kant, and explores the ways in which this transformation of concepts of the sublime informs Poe's importance as a proto-Modernist literary innovator