SOURCE: “Language and the Void: Gothic Landscapes in the Frontiers of Edgar Allan Poe,” in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1981, pp. 347-62.

In the following essay, Mainville examines Poe's handling of language in Pym and the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman, and focuses on his creation of Gothic landscapes.

Poe, in his two longer works, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman, attempts to create an air of geographical authenticity by including passages from actual explorers' journals.¹ In both of these works, the narrators travel into a frontier beyond the bounds of civilized, cultured man. Rodman literally purports to be an account of “the first passage across the Rocky Mountains of North America ever achieved by civilized man,” and Pym, as some critics have suggested, metaphorically disguises the American frontier as a seascape,² with Pym and his companions...