Narrative Vs Non-Narrative Poetry: The Comparative Analysis of Poe’s “Dream-Land” and “A Dream Within A Dream”

Contemporary narrative theory has undergone significant changes, incorporating new approaches. According to Meister (2009), the area now includes a variety of “new narratologies,” which can be grouped into three dominant paradigms: contextual, cognitive, and transgeneric. The latter is concerned with the application of narratological concepts to genres and media, which are not primarily regarded as narrative (e.g., poetry), but do possess – this way or another – narrative aspects. Although the application of narratological categories to the analysis of lyric poems has met severe criticism, Hühn defends this idea, offering the transgeneric narratological approach for the interpretation of poetic texts (Hühn, 2004, 2021). In our research we look at both language and stylistic preferences in the texts of a canonical American poet and prose writer Edgar Allan Poe. We claim that in Poe’s writings, form and genre affect each other, which is reflected in the author’s poetics. As a result, poetic narrativity becomes one of characteristic features of Poe’s idiostyle. In order to demonstrate these correlations between the two artistic forms, this study aims to apply the narratological approach to the comparative analysis of Poe’s narrative (“Dream-Land”) and non-narrative (“A Dream Within a Dream”) poems.