The Duality of Edgar Allan Poe’s Psychological Narrative and Urdu Short Fiction

ایڈگر ایلن پوکے نفسیاتی بیانیے کی ثنویت اور اُردو افسانہ نگاری 

Abstract

This article examines the psychological duality at the core of Edgar Allan Poe’s creative vision and traces how this duality oscillating between heightened emotion and analytical clarity forms a consistent artistic pattern. Poe’s narrative imagination emerges from an inward tension where fear, memory, guilt and isolation are processed through structured expression, resulting in an aesthetic that merges disorder with discipline. In this study, the focus is also directed toward the emergence of such tendencies within modern Urdu short fiction, where internal crises, fragmented identities and existential uncertainty gradually replace external narrative motives. Through comparison, it is observed that Urdu fiction assimilates psychological intensity in culturally distinct contexts, producing narratives in which human consciousness, silence, trauma and internal collapse become central. The article concludes that Poe’s influence does not reach Urdu literature merely through thematic resemblance, but through a deeper aesthetic paradigm in which inward disturbance becomes a coherent artistic experience, reflecting maturity of narrative vision in modern Urdu fiction.