SOURCE: "The Inquisitional Enclosures of Poe and Melville," in Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 162-81.
In this excerpt, Franchot examines Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" to demonstrate how elements of popular anti-Catholic tales of convent captivity became transformed in more literary tales of inquisitional and shipboard imprisonment.
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