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"The Whole Foundations Of The Solid Globe Were Suddenly Rent Asunder": Space Place And Homelessness In Poe's "The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym" And Melville's "Benito Cereno", Francis H. Hill

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the phenomenon of the hazy spaces on the periphery of the antebellum imagination that, while existing geographically at the very fringes of daily American life, are nonetheless active in the conceptualization, production, and representation of an idiosyncratic American sense of space: an anxiety of spatial fragmentation, formlessness, and modulation. In particular I am interested in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and Melville's “Benito Cereno,” both of which deal with American transoceanic travel to the proximity of Antarctica and its surrounding seas. These gothicized nautical fictions demonstrate an important dialectic playing out in these extreme spaces: …