期刊名称：Cercles : Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1292-8968
出版年度：2000
期号：1
页码：49-60
出版社：Université de Rouen
摘要：The science of optics plays an essential role in Poe's psychopathology of per-ception. Optical tricks in the tales are often caused or encouraged by the decor,and, in fact, the scientific study of perception not only drew on optical phe-nomena, but, later in the century, on the presence of these phenomena in dec-orative objects. Optical illusions or fallacies in vision are in fact subtlevariations on a problem that occupied psychiatrists, psychologists, and phi-losophers throughout the 19th century: the problem of distinguishing illu-sions of the senses from hallucinations. From the 1820s to the 1840s, importantadvances in optics were being made, and popular as well as intellectual inter-est was high. As C. J. Wright points out in his 1980 article, "The 'Spectre' ofScience: Optical Phenomena and the Romantic Imagination,"1the very un-certainty surrounding some of the laws of optics as well as the advances in thefield were responsible for this keen interest. The element of uncertaintywould, of course, play into the mysteries of the Gothic tale and the mysteriesof the mind and perception. Poe's familiarity with the work of Sir DavidBrewster, author of Letters on Natural Magic (1832), A Treatise on Optics (1835,published in America in 1843), and inventor of the kaleidoscope (1816) andthe stereoscope (1838) is well-documented
