Series statement from book jacket. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
Introduction : The unfolding investigation of Edgar Poe / J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples -- An orphan's life : 1809-1831 / James M. Hutchisson -- A life in print : 1831-1849 / Scott Peeples -- Poe : a life in letters / Lesley Ginsberg -- Poe's lives / Richard Kopley -- Orientalism in Poe's early poetry / John Carlos Rowe -- Echoes of "The Raven" : unoriginality in Poe's verse / Michael C. Cohen -- Poe's common meter / Virginia Jackson -- Early experiments in genre : imitations, burlesques, satires / Alexander Hammond -- The perversity of public opinion in Poe's later satires and hoaxes / Stacey Margolis -- Undead wives and undone husbands : Poe's tales of marriage / Ellen Weinauer -- Solving mysteries in Poe, or trying to / Susan Elizabeth Sweeney -- Deciphering Dupin : Poe's ratiocinative plots / Kelly Ross -- The calculus of probabilities : contingency in "The mystery of Marie Rogêt / Valerie Rohy -- Counterparts : Poe's doubles from "William Wilson" to "The Cask of Amontillado" / Paul Christian Jones -- Outing the perverse : Poe's false confessionals / Leland S. Person -- Poe's survival stories as dying colonialisms / Matt Sandler -- Poe's landscapes, picturesque and ideal / Kent P. Ljungquist -- Undying enigmas in "Ligeia" / Alexandra Urakova -- "The fall of the house of Usher" and the architecture of unreliability / Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet -- Genre, science, and "Hans Pfaall" / Maurice S. Lee / Rude representation : orienting the American frontier through the characters in Pym's Chasm / Jacob Rama Berman -- Pym and unreadability / Cindy Weinstein -- Poe's novel explorations / Lauren Coats -- Conversations on the body and the soul : transcending death in the angelic dialogues and "mesmeric revelation" / Bruce Mills -- Making sense of Eureka / Laura Saltz -- Poe the critic : the aesthetics of the "tomahawk" review / Paul Hurh -- The marginal center : "pinakidia," marginalia," and "fifty suggestions" / Stephen Rachman -- Poe the magazinist / Philip Edward Phillips -- Poe's cultural inheritance : literary touchstones and the cultivation of erudition / William E. Engel -- Ancestral piles : Poe's Gothic materials / Sean Moreland -- Kindred contemporaries : Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving / Carl Ostrowski -- Edgar Allan Poe and his enemies / Sandra Tomc -- Bluestockings and bohemians / Edward Whitley -- Poe and his global advocates / Emron Esplin -- Poe and modern(ist) poetry : an impure legacy / Margarida Vale de Gato -- An unrequited obsession : Poe and modern horror / W. Scott Poole -- Dupin's descendants in print and on screen / John Gruesser -- Poe's visual legacy / Barbara Cantalupo -- Poe and the avant-garde / Jonathan Elmer -- Postmodern Poe / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock -- Poe and science fiction / Paul Grimstad -- Poe and the sciences of the brain / Paul Gilmore -- Temporal effects : trauma, Margaret Fuller, and "graphicality" in Poe / Christina Zwarg -- Unqualified pleasure : Poe on forms of life / Branka Arsić -- Poe's terror analytics / J. Gerald Kennedy.
Summary:
No American author of the early 19th century enjoys a larger international audience than Edgar Allan Poe. Widely translated, read, and studied, he occupies an iconic place in global culture. Such acclaim would have gratified Poe, who deliberately wrote for "the world at large" and mocked the provincialism of strictly nationalistic themes. Partly for this reason, early literary historians cast Poe as an outsider, regarding his dark fantasies as extraneous to American life and experience. Only in the 20th century did Poe finally gain a prominent place in the national canon. Changing critical approaches have deepened our understanding of Poe's complexity and revealed an author who defies easy classification. New models of interpretation have excited fresh debates about his essential genius, his subversive imagination, his cultural insight, and his ultimate impact, urging an expansive reconsideration of his literary achievement.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.