Grotesque and Sublime Identities in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

This study examines how Edgar Allan Poe combines the modes of the grotesque and the sublime to represent and examine the fragile and complex construction of an unstable inner self. By blending those two modes and using their tension to create a visualisation of the process of identity loss and self-alienation, Poe sets up a frame within which he can reflect on the interpenetrability of the self in its relation to the surrounding world. Drawing on Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque imagery of the body and its limits and combining it with the notion of heroic subjectivity and its connection to the sublime, this study focuses on “William Wilson” and “The Man That Was Used Up” as two modern variations of what Bakhtin has termed the epic grotesque anatomy.