The Homo-Cameleopard: Poe’s Political Animals and the Grotesque

Abstract

This article takes up two somewhat obscure tales in the Poe canon—“Epimanes,” which was subsequently retitled “Four Beasts in One—The Homo-Cameleopard,” and “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”—for their explicit use of human-animal hybrids. The readings offered explore the grotesque as a problem of cultural vision and the figures of the “homo-cameleopard” and the “man-animal” as focal points for that vision. Poe’s grotesque focalizations allow readers to comprehend these crossed and combined creatures as part of a literary attempt to explore the contrast between the ancient and the modern as well as the challenges of representing the fused political animal that is the human.