Somme word with a mummy (1845)

from the conflict between science and the awareness of the reality of the past

Abstract

In this article we try to understand how the elements of American national history appear in the poem and storyteller Edgar Allan Poe's Somme word with a mummy (1845) without the pretension of mapping a referentialist identification. The intention here is to perceive the possible reading of his fantastic tale as a refiguration of nineteenth-century American history, without having it as the central particle of his work. So we try to avoid the desire to "reduce certain texts to representative, illustrative or symptomatic functions" (LACAPRA, 1983, p. 24). We focus on the referential dimension of the fictional text, thus approaching American history as the central theme for fantastic poeana literature. In this sense, we are concerned with demonstrating the narrative paths that endorse our prognosis, that fantastic literature is not directly subordinated to the imagination, that the referential ballast that composes it is directly intervening in the fictional composition and, thus, there is the conception of another world than the world of things.