The debate up to the mid-1980s is collected during a useful tho' incomplete volume,The stolen Edgar Allen Poe. Lacan's structuralist reading and Derrida's deconstructive reading angry a response by Barbara Johnson, UN agency mediate the talk by suggesting that the letter belongs right along to the Queen as a substitute for a phallus. The truth, for literary critic, is that the letter may be a castration of the King by the Queen, that Lacan cannot see/abide/is blind to. more established Lacan's reading in 'Le Facteur de la vérité' ('The provider of Truth'), noting what Lacan 'missed' and suggesting that it's not that the letter lacks that means, as Lacan claimed, however that Lacan created the dearth the that means. Jacques Lacan argued in Ecrits that the content of the Queen's letter is extraneous to the story which the right 'place' of the form (the letter itself) is set by the symbolic structure within which it exists and is displaced, 1st by the Minister and so by Dupin. Poe's story angry a discussion among literary theorists within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies.

The purloined letter analysis