Download or read book A World of Words written by Michael J. S. Williams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1988-03-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A World of Words offers a new look at the degree to which language itself is a topic of Poe's texts. Stressing the ways his fiction reflects on the nature of its own signifying practices, Williams sheds new light on such issues as Poe's characterization of the relationship between author and reader as a struggle for authority, on his awareness of the displacement of an "authorial writing self" by a "self as it is written," and on his debunking of the redemptive properties of the romantic symbol.