Edgar Allan Poe's Hop-Frog and Abolitionist Movement in the United States

Abstract

Abstract: Edgar Allan Poe's Hop-Frog is a horror fiction written in 1849. By discussing the two famous political rhetoric: proslavery and abolitionism, the condition of southern slavery and the relationship between Poe and racism, this paper aims to reveal the racial identities of the protagonist hop-frog and the king, to break the racial code in the text, and to analyze the social and cultural reasons that Poe created the plots of the king enslaving hop-frog and hop-frog revenging on the king, at the background of the first half of the 19th century which Poe lived in all his life. Nowadays, rereading Hop-Frog would facilitate a clearer recognition about the contradictory attitude of Poe for southern slavery in his old age.

CLC Number:

I106.7

ZHANG Hu. Edgar Allan Poe's Hop-Frog and Abolitionist Movement in the United States[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2013, 13(01): 68-72.

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