TRANSGENERIC NARRATOLOGICAL VISTA: (POE)TICS READDRESSED

Contemporary narrative theory has undergone significant changes, integrating new approaches to literary analysis. This field now encompasses “new narratologies”, including the transgeneric one, which concerns the application of narratological concepts to genres and media that are not primarily considered narrative, but nevertheless betray narrative features. This paper outlines new directions in poetic text interpretation. To this end, the study offers a comparative stylistic and narratological analysis of “Dream-Land” and “A Dream Within a Dream” by the American poet and prose writer Edgar Allan Poe, looking at style (e.g., foregrounding) and such narrative elements as the situational model, the plot, and the narrative perspective. Such forms of foregrounding as graphological deviation and parallelism on the lexical, phonological and syntactic levels are examined. As a result, the poem “Dream-Land” is defined as ultimately narrative. On the other hand, “A Dream Within a Dream” does not meet the criteria of narrative poetry while still containing several narrative elements. Therefore, the term “quasi-narrative” poetry is introduced. Thus, a promising direction for further investigation of Poe’s poetics lies in establishing regularities between the form and genres based on more texts of the author. Additionally, as the last decade witnessed a significant development of reader-oriented research models, another direction of the analysis could involve an empirical study of real readers’ responses to the author’s poetry and prose.