A Backward Glance over Some Leading Citizens in the Poe World

Poe Studies Association Updates

By the same editors from Translated Poe (2014) and part of the Perspectives on Poe series from with Lehigh University Press, this book offers itself as a groundbreaking, innovative work, shedding light on an aspect of Poe studies which, otherwise, has received little attention. Emron Esplin, a scholar particularly interested in Poe's reception by Argentinian writers and critics such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, and Margarida Vale de Gato, a reputable translator of Poe's works into Portuguese and a specialist in translation studies, contend in their essay-length introduction to the volume that “anthologies and the concepts of anthologizing, organizing, collecting, and/or editing an author's work receive relatively little coverage in the literary market or in the scholarly tradition” (2). In relation to Edgar Allan Poe, this certainly seems to be the case. Although one of the most anthologized authors, not only in the United States but also in many countries in the world, Poe lacks studies regarding his place in the canon of anthologizers, which he himself tried to be, as well as studies addressing up to what extent anthologies have fostered the reading of Poe's tales in different literary systems.Contributors to the collection of essays come from an interesting and diverse range of countries, such as the United States, Russia, England, Portugal, Spain, and Japan, and offer readers interested in Poe's works as well as in anthology and translation studies a rich opportunity to learn about Poe's relation to the topic. Organized into four parts and covering seventeen chapters, the volume opens in Part 1 with three essays dedicated to Poe's role as anthologizer and his place in what Esplin and Vale de Gato call “(proto) anthologies of the 1840s” (v).In Chapter 1, Jana L. Argersinger addresses Poe's interest and role in placing himself as an anthologizer, having published The Literati of New York City, “his 1846 anthology of forty-one such profiles serialized in Godey's Lady's Book” (21). Argersinger contends for what she calls a relational aesthetics pursued by Poe as he portrayed different contemporary writers and evaluated their works, thus coming up with an intense and rather complex intertextual and interpersonal network, sometimes projecting himself in the life and works of contemporaries such as Margaret Fuller. Argersinger claims Poe's anthology may be read as an attempt toward searching for belonging to a canon and, at the same time, trying to build it up. The Poe scholar also remembers the notorious literary battle between Poe and Rufus Griswold, who also organized, published, and republished anthologies and helped forge and perpetuate a dark image of his rival which would last for a long time.In Chapter 2, Harry Lee Poe gives readers an in-depth and detailed account of Poe's literary project and how he planned his publications to form a whole, abiding by his famous “unity of effect” formula. His distant cousin claims that instead of writing and publishing stories and poems around genres and topics, Edgar Allan Poe wanted his works to form “a collective whole” (40), and he carefully planned every step toward reaching such an objective. Harry Lee Poe argues this was no easy task, however, as “Poe had no control over the order of publication of his earliest stories, and he did not necessarily have a plan for the order in which he wrote different kinds of tales” (41). This scenario, according to Harry Lee Poe, started changing as more stories would come out in periodicals and newspapers, especially after Poe managed to publish his first collections of stories and thus gain more control over his works. Overall, Harry Lee Poe offers readers details of negotiations between Poe and his editors and publishers throughout his career, detailing how Poe managed to fulfill his literary project only partially. After Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) came out, followed by Tales (1845)—which Harry Lee Poe considers “a supplement of sorts to the earlier collection” (55)—and perhaps given the circumstances of the author's hectic life, no other collection was published, not even Poe's long dreamed of complete works. However, the chapter closes with an interesting idea: Poe was an anthologist and ended up publishing a series of stories in the Broadway Journal, having to constantly deal with choosing what to select or not, which arrangements to make, a careful plan which, according to Harry Lee Poe, relates to the arguments present in Poe's “Philosophy of Composition.”Part 1 of the volume closes with a chapter by Russian Poe scholar Alexandra Urakova, who addresses the connections between the tradition of gift books in the nineteenth-century United States and how poems and prose works would be selected to appear in those books. As Urakova puts it, gift books were not anthologies, but rather “collections of poetry and prose bound together as holiday gifts, usually sold during the Christmas season” (59). Poe's poem “Eleonora” is, according to Urakova, an example of a poem published in the 1842's The Gift: A Christmas and New Year Present. The chapter opens with theoretical considerations aiming at telling gift books and anthologies apart, the former considered random compilations of publications without a unique line of arguments or themes, while the latter imply a careful and planned selection based on a certain purpose. For Urakova, the fact that Poe engaged with a popular tradition and at the same time published a poem many scholars have long considered to be of minor interest to the canon of Poe's works should be reconsidered. On the one hand, Urakova claims “Eleonora” shares aspects with other works by the author, such as “Berenice” and “Island of the Fay,” as far as theme, the topos of the death of a beautiful woman and a romantic take on plot. On the other hand, “Eleonora” seems to bear a dialogue with works by women writers and with the flower tradition portrayed in the gift book: as Urakova argues, the same ornaments present in the poem appear in the flower illustrations inside the publication. The critic closes the chapter claiming for “Eleonora” and Poe to be reconsidered in the gift book tradition (69), since it was not the only time Poe published in gift books: as Urakova br iefly mentions, “Purloined Letter” and “William Wilson” also appeared in The Gift.Part 2 brings five chapters addressing Poe's works appearing in editions in collective or individual anthologies in the United States and England. Jeffrey Savoye, in Chapter 4, discusses Poe's early editions, those by Griswold, Ingram, Stedman, and Woodberry, as well as the one by Harrison. As Savoye puts it, “These editions represent the formative period of scholarly attempts at publishing a comprehensive collection of Poe's writings” (76). Besides bringing readers the history of those editions, of how they came about and of the choices made by their editors, with their strengths and weaknesses, Savoye argues for their historical relevance in helping future generations have contact with Poe's complete works, a project the author had in mind but could not fulfill in his lifetime.In Chapter 5, Travis Montgomery focuses on the landmark editions of Poe's works in the twentieth century, whose editors followed Harrison's groundbreaking work as a compiler of Poe's writings. Montgomery refers to “Killis Campbell, John W. Ostrom, Floyd Stovall, Thomas Olive Mabbott, Burton R. Pollin, Patrick F. Quinn, and G. R. Thompson” (99); for the critic, “their editions contained generally reliable texts of Poe's writings, texts based on careful study of available sources” (99). Although differing from popular anthologies, according to Montgomery, those editions “bear similarities to compilations of that order” (99). In this chapter, the critic takes a similar path to Savoye's by comparing the different editions, underscoring their uniqueness, and exploring their history of publication.Taking a different space framework into consideration, in Chapter 6 the English Poe scholar Bonnie Shannon McMullen discusses Poe's appearance in anthologies and editions in Britain from 1852 to 1914. The critic shows how Poe's reception and consequent publication history in Britain shifted from initial admiration (given his similarities in terms to themes and topoi with English Romantics) to what McMullen considers “near contempt” as the reading public changed and, finally, to an acceptance as a versatile writer, capable of dealing with various genres and, therefore, being considered “a serious writer” (118).Chapter 7, by J. Gerald Kennedy, focuses exclusively on one anthology, or rather, a reader, published by Penguin, titled The Penguin Portable. Kennedy shares a personal account in the chapter, since he was invited in 2003 to revise the first edition of this collection, from 1947, by Philip Van Doren Stern. Kennedy approaches the history of how he was invited, of how this work relates to his personal background and publication history, as well as of how he decided to reorganize the original edition, in accordance with the publishing house editorial decisions, adding tales, poems, letters, and criticism that the 1947 version had not included. Kennedy thus addresses his personal and Penguin's editorial choices, related to the market and readership interests, and relates how the need he felt to “bring Poe back” to the United States and associate his writings with antebellum America helped frame what to include in the collection.Scott Peeples charts similar ground as Savoye and Montgomery, although the corpus differs, as he compares forty different college anthologies ranging from 1925 to 2017. As he puts it, “I discuss the historical shifts as well as the historical constants in the way Poe has been represented in college textbooks” (151). Peeples surveys those textbooks, searching for repetitions and omissions of Poe's tales and poems. Perhaps of more interest to readers, however, is the fact that the critic pinpoints how Poe is referred to by the editors in footnotes and opening essays to those textbooks: sometimes as a great writer, sometimes as a useless rascal marked by death and drunkenness, which reveals how Poe has been received by the editorial market, critics, and readers alike throughout times.Part 3 opens to a different approach in the volume: the analysis of anthologies organized by genre rather than by author or theme, as well as of audiobooks. In Chapter 9, Stephen Rachman opens with a quick, yet interesting, discussion of what anthologies are about and what they cater toward. In his own words, “What we might call the anthology-function operates by uniting the diverse works of different authors into a generic whole—pointing toward the common features of the genre, movement, or topic covered in the particular anthology, not the individual author” (167). He then moves toward discussing Poe's role as a precursor of science fiction and his presence in anthologies dedicated to the genre due to his many stories portraying scientific or pseudo-scientific events.In Chapter 10, John Gruesser takes a similar path as Rachman regarding Poe and genre, this time in relation to detective fiction. Addressing the five stories critics tend to relate to the genre—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Gold Bug,” and “Thou Art the Man”—plus “The Man of the Crowd,” a tale perhaps less associated with the genre, Gruesser discusses the rise of detective fiction as well as Poe's place in the canon as a forebear in the United States.Chapter 11 brings in Michelle Kay Hansen following a very interesting, although different, path from the other critics in this collection. Rather than discussing literary texts in print, Hansen focuses on audiobooks, opening up for multimodality. She addresses a specific anthology of Gothic and horror literature—that is, an anthology geared toward a specific genre, but in audiobook format—Doug Bradley's Spinechillers: Classic Horror Audio Books. As Hansen claims, “Each of the thirteen volumes of this anthology features Edgar Allan Poe at least once. Most of the time, however, Poe appears twice in each volume, with one short story and one poem (which always concludes the volume)” (208). Hansen showcases this anthology, “its use of nostalgia,” and “its reliance on popular culture ‘horror icons’” (208). The chapter offers an intriguing analysis of a fairly recent popular culture genre in relation to Poe's relevance and contribution to it.Chapter 12 presents an essay by Philip Edward Phillips, former Poe Studies Association president, addressing the presence of Poe's poetry in anthologies. He initially mentions Poe's intense career as a poet and his presence in anthologies that readers encounter from an early age. Phillips focuses on a historical overview of poetry anthologies in the United States, from the earliest collections published toward the very end of the eighteenth century, before thoroughly discussing Griswold's anthologies as well as those of his and Poe's contemporaries, and not forgetting the many collections published in the second half of the nineteenth century. The later part of the chapter refers to anthologies from the twentieth century as well as editions by Oxford from the twenty-first. The overview provided by Phillips is enriched by two illustrations from frontispieces of Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America (1842), given its relation to Poe, as well as the one from Stedman's An American Anthology, published in 1900 and portraying Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman together with six other poets.Part 4 of the book focuses on Poe and his presence in anthologies abroad (beyond the Anglophone path addressed in Part 2). In Chapter 13, Margarida Vale de Gato addresses the French reception of Poe's poems and tales, as well as his French translators, illustrators, and editors, among them Charles Baudelaire, considered “the maker of Poe in French prose” in Vale de Gato's own words (250). She also shows how a specific aspect of Poe's works became prevalent in France—the fantastic—given the editorial choices of those involved in translating, illustrating, and anthologizing Poe in the country.Christopher Rollason, in Chapter 14, tackles France and the United Kingdom (the latter also addressed by Bonnie McMullen, as mentioned above). Rollason argues that Poe's works may be placed on “the fault line between high culture and popular culture” (277). Following this direction, the critic discusses series of popular culture anthologies such as Everyman's Library, in which Poe appeared for the first time in 1908, as well as the Collins Classics anthology of Poe's works, published in 1952. He also addresses the Penguin collection, which may be considered both a popular and academic edition, catering to both publics. As for academic editions, Rollason analyzes the French Folio anthology, largely read by French scholars and encompassing multiple authors and works in its extensive collection.Chapter 15 tackles Poe editions published in Spain. In a richly illustrated essay, Fernando González-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragón show Poe's reception in Spain during the Civil War, the Francoist regime, and its aftermath. His works are discussed from this historical and political perspective, showing how they may be read against what was going on in Spain at that time.Chapter 16 also brings in the Spanish-speaking world, but this time readers encounter the Argentinian context. Emron Esplin discusses Poe's reception in Argentina by some of its most prominent writers and translators, namely Carlos Olivera, Armando Bazán, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Esplin shows how, since the first anthology, by Olivera, published in 1884, Poe was read from the point of view of his tales of terror, ratiocination, the fantastic, and the supernatural. Such aspects of Poe's work were what interested those translators, publishers, and critics, according to Esplin, thus framing Poe's reception in Argentina.Closing the volume, in Chapter 17, reputable Poe Japanese scholar Takayuki Tatsumi offers a reading that many will perhaps be less familiar with: how Poe was read in Japan, from the nineteenth century on, in a historical period called the Meiji Revolution (1853–77), which “served as an incubator for the reception of Western literature and culture” (353). As Tatsumi recalls, referring to a previous study published in Translated Poe by the same editors of this collection, the first translations of Poe's stories into Japanese were done by Shiken Morita, who lived during this Meiji Revolution period. Poe would undergo many different periods of intense publication in Japan, from the early twentieth century on, including a strong presence in juvenile anthologies and in recent publications from the twenty-first century. The chapter summarizes those anthologies, offering readers the opportunity to get acquainted with them.Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations and (Trans)National Canons thus provides readers with what the title points at: a rich panorama of Poe's presence, in different spaces and times, as well as a diverse picture of how his works were received, read, and reinterpreted by different publishers, editors, translators, and illustrators. The rich introduction opening the collection offers an in-depth analysis of anthology studies, the different theories regarding how anthologies are conceived, and the possible paths toward further studies. In all, the book caters toward anyone interested in Poe's works as well as anthology and translation studies. Poe scholars and undergraduate and graduate students working on Poe's works would certainly benefit from the book as well. Perhaps an anthology in itself, the volume does what its editors mention from the start: it involves choices, inclusions, and deletions. Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato close the introduction with a disclaimer: that decisions were made and that there is much more room for critics to pursue further studies on the topic. This is certainly true, as many more countries and contexts could have been included. Perhaps a second volume would solve this problem.

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Nina Baym: June 14, 1936—June 15, 2018

Introduction Promoting the Study of Modern Literatures Worldwide: The MLA and Its Conventions

Few would hazard a challenge to long-standing opinions that Poe was a master of the Gothic horror tale, although many might not as readily be aware that he did not invent Gothic fiction. When he began to attract widespread attention by publishing several macabre tales in the Southern Literary Messenger in early 1835, critics sounded negative notes concerning his “Germanism,” a synonym for Gothicism, just as they deplored his wasting talents on what they deemed had become an outmoded type of fiction. Such caveats, as well as many offered over the course of the century succeeding his death, notwithstanding Poe's Gothic tales, are what have typically attracted greatest numbers of readers, and that allurement is wholly understandable. A descent from such British milestones in literary Gothicism as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford's Vathek (1786), W. H. Ireland's The Abbess (1798), or Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) is evident in Poe's writings. In his own day the brief tale of terror, familiarly known to the Anglo-American readership as the signature for fiction in the popular Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , served as Poe's, and other Americans', model, time and again, although his accomplishments in the short story far surpassed what now often reads like so much dross in the pages of the celebrated Scottish and other contemporaneous literary magazines from the first half of the nineteenth century.

Although I majored in American Literature, rather than English, at Middlebury College and took numerous—probably ten—American literature courses, I never had to read The Scarlet Letter. In the nineteenth-century American novel course I took, we read The Marble Faun. In graduate school, I didn't have to read The Scarlet Letter either, even though I took two seminars that included Hawthorne. We read The Marble Faun in a seminar on American writers abroad (and I was fortunate to publish the paper I wrote—my first publication—on The Marble Faun and Henry James's The American). In a seminar on Hawthorne and Melville, we read The Blithedale Romance, probably because it paired nicely with Pierre. A scarlet letter A for Absence in my college and graduate school experience. Perhaps that delayed gratification ultimately resulted in The Scarlet Letter being the literary work about which I have written most often.My early career—virtually the first ten years of it—was also marked by some absences, especially in view of what today's graduate students and tenure-track professors experience—and have on their résumés. When I was in graduate school, I understood that attending professional conferences (except MLA the year you were on the job market) wasn't important. Graduate students didn't give papers, did they? Only faculty members—and probably advanced ones at that—gave talks. At least that's what I understood. Now, I realize that the profession simply had not yet caught up with the downturn in the job market and so didn't see the need or advantage of grad students' having conference papers on their résumés. Unheard of today: During the first ten years of my tenure-track and then tenured career, I gave a total of three conference papers. The first was at an Indiana Folklore Society meeting. The second (on The Virginian and Main Street) was at a Western Literature Association meeting. Neither was even remotely connected to Hawthorne.It was the third paper that marked a turning point in my career. But first a little background. In 1986, I happened to see an ad for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society's summer meeting at Bowdoin College. I saw the ad well after the deadline for submitting a paper, but I wouldn't have had anything to propose even though, by that point, I had published two articles on Hawthorne—the first on The Marble Faun, the second on The Scarlet Letter (“The Scarlet Letter and the Myth of the Divine Child”). Somewhere along the way, I had managed to read The Scarlet Letter on my own! At any rate, joining the Hawthorne Society and traveling to Bowdoin for a meeting of this august body sounded like just the thing. So, I went, having little idea what the experience would be like and knowing, I soon came to realize, absolutely no one among the many attendees. To say that I was a little intimidated is to put my feeling mildly. I was an imposter—staring in some wonder at people whose contributions to Hawthorne scholarship I knew—Woodson, Gollin, Newberry, James Cox, who gave the keynote address, not to mention all of the other people who were giving papers. These were the insiders—the experts—whom, I suddenly realized, I wanted to be like.Almost all of us stayed in a Bowdoin dorm for that conference, and I was happy to escape to my room after I checked in. There was a dinner, as I recall, and I thought I should change for that, so I walked into the bathroom not far from my single room to wash up a bit. I hadn't been in there long when the door on the opposite side of this relatively large room opened, and in walked two women. This was, apparently, either a co-ed bathroom, or I had made a terrible blunder. Now, I was not naked—I swear I wasn't—and I'm sure the ladies were too polite to notice anyway, because for the rest of the conference I was known as “the young man with the moustache.” At least that's what Rita Gollin and Lea Newman called me when next we saw each other at dinner and for the rest of the conference—and even afterwards. Getting “caught” partially clothed in that bathroom turned out to be very important to my subsequent career, although I'm certainly not recommending this as a strategy for younger scholars reading this essay. And I can't help noting, especially in view of the interest I developed in Henry James, that calling me “the young man with the moustache” was an allusion (?) lost on me at the time. In The Portrait of a Lady, when Madame Merle is interrogating Isabel Archer about her experiences, especially her romantic experiences, she asks her if she has had “a young man with a moustache going down on his knees to you.” Isabel pretends, as Madame Merle reads her, that she doesn't care about having any young man with a moustache, but Merle insists in her worldly way that “[w]e have all had the young man with the moustache. He is the inevitable young man; he doesn't count.” It's possible, I want to think, that at a Hawthorne conference these two nice scholarly ladies thought immediately of Henry James when they encountered this young man in a Bowdoin bathroom. But even if they did, they certainly didn't make me feel as if I didn't count. Just the contrary.It would help that evening that I had grown up in New England, because the Bowdoin summer meeting featured an old-fashioned lobster bake. I had been eating whole Maine lobsters for a long time, but not everyone attending the conference had been so fortunate. I might not have been the most experienced Hawthornian at the table, but I knew how to get every ounce of meat out of a boiled lobster. Several people at my table were grateful for the help.But truly, going forward, the generosity of Lea and Rita, as well as that of John Idol, Tom Woodson, David Kesterson, Fred Newberry, Dennis Berthold, Melissa Ponder, and other Hawthornians gave me a scholarly home that I just hadn't had before. That December at the MLA Convention I gave the third conference paper of my career—on Hawthorne's love letters, subsequently published in American Literature—at a Hawthorne Society session that included Nina Baym, whose work I had idolized. Nina became a good friend and ally, and I was proud many years later to dedicate the Norton Critical Edition of The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings to her “in token of my admiration for her career.” I also appreciated the irony of producing an edition of a novel that had not been part of my formal classroom education.Things can move fast in the Hawthorne Society. I published a book in 1988 that included three chapters on Hawthorne, and just two years after that this “young man with the moustache” found himself elected president of the society and organizing the 1992 summer meeting in Concord. (That meeting included a lobster bake!) In the “old days” it was understood that accepting the nomination for society president meant organizing the summer meeting that preceded one's term of office. Concord was my place of choice—the closest thing scholars of Hawthorne and others (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott) have to a literary mecca. I was lucky enough to stumble upon Concord Academy in the center of Concord. The academy turned out to be an excellent venue for the summer meeting, and I don't think Concord disappointed anyone. After I stepped down as president, I volunteered to serve as the society's treasurer and didn't miss a summer meeting for nearly three decades.The Hawthorne Society has been a scholarly home for me for more than thirty years. The friendship I experienced at that Bowdoin summer meeting marked a turning point in my career and has sustained me ever since. Oh, and I've managed to compensate for my lack of experience with The Scarlet Letter early in my career. By my count, I have managed to find seven different ways of looking at and writing about Hawthorne's novel.

The jury is still out on Eureka. Although still a seemingly anomalous outlier in Poe's oeuvre, Eureka has been given high marks for its remarkable anticipation of many features of twentieth- and twenty-first-century physics, astronomy, and cosmology even as it still challenges modern nonscientific readers with its conceptual rigors. And while recent scholars such as René van Slooten and David N. Stamos have explored the myriad scientific and philosophical insights found in Poe's cosmological treatise, the average Poe aficionado often steers clear of the text after a first reading. Poe himself, of course, set great store by his last major creative effort, writing to Maria Clemm on July 7, 1849, “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.” First published in June 1848 and dedicated to the German scientist and polymath Alexander von Humboldt, author of the multivolume Kosmos, Eureka had been debuted as a lecture at the New York Society Library lecture on February 3 while Poe was trying to raise money for his projected magazine, The Stylus. Among Eureka skeptics, the New York editor and critic Evert Duyckinck, who launched Poe's first collection of Tales (1845), wrote his brother George after the lecture that it was “full of ludicrous display of scientific phrase—a mountainous piece of absurdity for a popular lecture.” But for more discerning and sympathetic readers, the world has been catching up with Poe's cosmological intuitions ever since.In his new study of Eureka, Robert J. Scholnick, a scholar specializing in the intersection of nineteenth-century American writers and science, presents a useful examination of the scientific and cultural milieus that produced Poe's work, highlighting the possible influence of the writings of Erasmus Darwin as well as the other scientific minds who likely helped shape Poe's thinking such as William Herschel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, John Pringle Nichol, Robert Chambers, and Alexander von Humboldt. Produced when the concepts of Deep Space and Deep Time were beginning to alert individuals to the staggering age and size of the universe, Eureka was in fact, in Scholnick's view, an integral part of an emerging scientific debate over cosmic and planetary evolution; indeed, it was “grounded in the radical, dangerous science of its own time” and “part of a vibrant and contentious transatlantic discourse that addressed fundamental questions of science, social structure, and religious belief” (iv). As Scholnick notes, Eureka has the distinction of anticipating a number of key concepts in modern astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics including the theories of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, the idea of a multiverse, the equivalency of matter and energy, the concept of a pulsating or oscillating universe, the existence of black holes, the butterfly effect as set forth by chaos theory, the space-time continuum, and more. Poe was well trained in mathematics at West Point and, as a book-reviewing polymath, well read in many of the contemporary sciences of his day, notably astronomy. But to what extent did Poe draw on contemporary science for his ideas, and to what extent were they original to his literary imagination?In his analysis of the influences on Eureka, Scholnick emphasizes those figures like Erasmus Darwin and William Herschel whose ideas and discoveries tended to undermine traditional religious beliefs and extend the subversive power of the European Enlightenment in order to conceptualize the idea of an evolving, dynamic materialist universe little resembling the biblical mythology of Genesis. Scholnick thus begins by providing an overview of some of the leading scientific ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing particularly on the work of Erasmus Darwin, a brilliant doctor, scientist, and progressive thinker of the later eighteenth century whose writings suggested the evolutionary basis of life on earth, as set forth in the two-volume medical treatise Zoonomia, and in the didactic poems The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature. Scholnick notes that Poe demonstrated his acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin's posthumous poem Temple of Nature (1803) by alluding to it in number 69 of his “Pinakidia,” published in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Scholnick argues that Darwin's popularity in the early nineteenth-century United States, both because of his scientific acumen and his championship of American democracy, made it likely that Poe read Darwin's didactic poetry and may have gleaned there his ideas of the explosive origin and future collapse of the universe.In Chapter 1 Scholnick provides an overview of how Poe went from his 1827 “Sonnet—to Science,” which depicted science as a vulture preying on the poet's heart, to his embrace two decades later of a subversive Romantic-era science in Eureka. Influential along this route was likely the publication of Robert Chamber's Vestiges of the Natural History of the Earth, a sensational publication in both England and the United States in 1844–45 for its depiction of an evolutionary history of the earth beginning with the formation of the planet according to Laplace's nebular hypothesis, which in turn drew on the astronomer Hershel's recent findings on the seeming evolutionary growth and development of celestial phenomena. Scholnick notes that Poe denied having read Vestiges, although the astonishing popularity of the work makes it seem likely that he was familiar with its basic ideas. Like the anonymous author of Vestiges in his history of the planet, Poe would be positing the materialist, evolutionary development of the cosmos, with the token figure of God providing only an initial impetus for creation. Poe's Eureka thus clearly took advantage of the intense contemporary interest in new scientific ideas in the 1840s. Eureka was also symptomatic of the work of other lesser-known scientific figures of the era whose work advanced the materialist focus of science away from the orthodox ideas of natural theology; these included the surgeon William Lawrence, whose daring writings on physiology were read by Percy and Mary Shelley and influenced the creation of Frankenstein.In Chapter 2, Scholnick points out the concept of the sublime that pervaded Poe's writings and appeared in Eureka, noting that “the sublime serves as a perceptual vehicle for a journey back to the origins of everything and forward to the cosmic collapse” (41). Poe, of course, was deeply read in Burke's influential treatise on the subject, but it is still a moot question whether he also knew of Kant's theories of the sublime, whether at first- or secondhand. The ineffable sublime scale of the cosmos depicted in Eureka, according to Scholnick, also traces its scientific lineage back to the atomism of Lucretius, whose unorthodox poem on the atomistic composition of the universe had been steadily gaining an audience, appearing in England in 1805 in a translation by John Mason Good, later the author of the popular Book of Nature (1826). In Chapters 3 and 4, Scholnick returns to the similarities between Eureka and the pioneering ideas of Erasmus Darwin in their shared depictions of an evolving universe: “Both in Darwin's poetry and in his prose, Poe could have found sublime depictions of the Big Bang and also of the Big Crunch, as well as a direct reference to the foundational discoveries of William Herschel” (67).Finally, in Chapter 5 Scholnick examines the relationship between Eureka and the work of Alexander von Humboldt, the first volume of whose five-volume Kosmos was published by Harper and Brothers in the United States in 1847. Scholnick notes that Poe reprinted an English translation of a German review of the first volume of Kosmos in the Broadway Journal on July 12, 1845, a review that noted von Humboldt's initial presentation of his ideas in a lecture series in 1827–28 in Berlin—a possible reason for Poe's initial presentation of the ideas in Eureka in his February 1848 lecture. The introduction to the first volume of von Humboldt's masterpiece included an overview of the latest discoveries in astronomy, also possibly providing an important impetus for Poe's composition of Eureka. Von Humboldt was notable for his embrace of a Romantic view of science that welcomed the coexistence of intellectual rigor and artistic imagination, an idea that Poe also palpably endorsed in his cosmological treatise. As the most celebrated scientist of the mid-nineteenth century, whose work had a profound impact on American science, environmentalism, literature, and art, von Humboldt was well suited to be the tutelary spirit to Poe's treatise.Overall, in his study Scholnick provides a suggestive overview of the scientific milieu in which Poe was writing Eureka and a stimulus for further the study of a number of scientific figures who might have influenced Poe's late work. Scholnick's discussion of the figure of Erasmus Darwin is especially intriguing, but it needs further exploration and development to attain more critical mass. The emphasis on Erasmus Darwin in the title of the book thus draws attention to this relatively unexplored connection, but Scholnick's study also provides an informative guide to several other figures within the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century radical scientific community who played a role in the larger scientific and cultural context of Eureka. In Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850, Scholnick thus has produced a very useful gloss on a Poe text that continues to both baffle and fascinate the common reader even as it offers a tantalizing skeleton key to the mysteries of the cosmos—the final testament to Poe's brilliant cryptographic imagination.

Poe Writing/Writing Poe

R I C H A R D H. C R A C R O F T Brigham Young University Research in Western American Literature The following items, gathered from graduate coordinators in depart­ ments of English across the nation, and from Dissertation Abstracts and secret sources known only to the compiler, represent much of the work in Western American Literature from about September, 1974 through about September, 1975. Some titles are listed which were done in earlier years but which went unreported last year. I have omitted a number of non-western studies dealing with Mark Twain. In general, studies in Western American Literature seem to be down somewhat from the last two years. Please send notices of completed or in-progress studies relevant to Western American Literature to: Prof. Richard H. Cracroft, Chair­ man, Department of English, A-246 JKBA, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 84602. I. COMPLETED THESES AND DISSERTATIONS. Ahearn, Kerry David “Aspects of the Contemporary American Western Novel'’ (Ph.D.) Ohio University, 1974. Anderson, Marilyn Jeanne “The Image of the American Indian in American Drama: From 1766 to 1845” (Ph.D.) University of Minnesota. Axelrad, Allan M. “History and Utopia: A Study of the World View of James Fenimore Cooper” (Ph.D.) University of Pennsylvania, 1974. Baxter, Charles Morley “Black Hole in Space: The Figure of the Artist in Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, Djuna Barns’ Sightivood, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano” (Ph.D.) State University of New York at Buffalo, 1974. 322 Western American Literature Beisman, Emmeline B. “The Prospector and the Pioneer: A Key to the Selected Short Stories of Bret Harte” (Ph.D.) The University of New Mexico, 1975. Bradt, David Richard “From Fiction to Film: An Analysis of Aesthetic and Cultural Implica­ tions in the Adaption of Two American Novellas” (Ph.D.) Washington State University, 1974. (Billy Budd, Miss Lonely Hearts.) Burbick, Joan Susan “The Art of Days: Perspectives on The Journal of Henry Thoreau” (Ph.D.) Brandeis University, 1974. Byrd, Charles Lively “A Descriptive Bibliography of the Oliver LaFarge Collection at the University of Texas” (Ph.D.) University of Texas at Austin, 1974. Cauthers, Janet Helen “The North American Indian as Portrayed by American and Canadian Historians, 1830-1930” (Ph.D.) University of Washington, 1974. Channing, Michael Denis “The Representation of Nature in Twentieth-Century American Poetry” (Ph.D.) Stanford University, 1974. Clayton, Lawrence Ray “John A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads: A Critical Study” (Ph.D.) Texas Tech University, 1974. Cosgrove, Robert William “Joseph Kirkland and Edgar Watson Howe: A Reappraisal of Their Fiction With Emphasis on Their Realism” (Ph.D.) Purdue University, 1974. Culbert, Gary Allen “Hamlin Garland’s Image of Woman: An Allegiance to Ideality” (Ph.D.) University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974. Davis, Joseph Addison “Rolling Home: The Open Road as Myth and Symbol in American Literature, 1890-1940” (Ph.D.) University of Michigan, 1974. Deahl, William Evans, Jr. “A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 1883-1913” (Ph.D.) Southern Illinois University, 1974. DeFlyer, Joseph Eugene “Partition Theory: Patterns and Partitions of Consciousness in Selected Works of American and American Indian Authors” (Ph.D.) The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1974. Research 323 Dervin, James Allen “Washington Irving Tours the Frontier: A New Yorker Sees and Shapes the Raw Materials of Frontier Life” (Ph.D.) The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974. Dussere, David Philip “A Critical Biography of Charles Heber Clark (“Max Adeler”) : Ameri­ can Journalist and Humorist” (Ph.D.) University of Arkansas, 1974. Fitzmaurice, James Earl “Migration Epics of the Trans-Mississippi West” (Ph.D.) University of Maryland, 1974. (The Prairie, Children of God, The Way West, The Last Frontier, Spirit Lake, Giants in the Earth, and The Grapes of Wrath.) Fleming, Patricia Jean “The Integrated Self: Sexuality and the Double in Willa Cather’s Fiction” (Ph.D.) Boston University Graduate School, 1974. French, John Thatcher “Adamic Redemption in American Literature: 1945 to the Present” (Ph.D.) McGill University (Canada), 1974. Gilbert, Susan Hull “James Fenimore Cooper: The Historical Novel and the Critics” (Ph.D.) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974. Gilgen, Read Grant “The Short Story of the Absurd in Spanish America” (Ph...

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

The Legacy of Joe Skerrett John Wharton Lowe (bio) I was devastated last summer when my dear friend Joe Skerrett suddenly left us; his legacy, however, of brilliant scholarship and teaching, and his generosity and greatness of spirit, remains. One of the greatest achievements of his long and productive career was winning the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Distinguished Retiring Editor Award. As they recognized, his editorship of MELUS was heroic, path-breaking, and immensely influential. During his twelve years at its helm, what was once an obscure journal with limited circulation became the leading periodical in the field of ethnic literary studies. He charted new paths, alternating “Varieties of Ethnic Criticism” editions with focused issues on topics such as Native American Literature, Asian American Literature, and Ethnic Women’s Literature. He charged scholars of various subsets of ethnic literary study to edit special editions devoted to Ethnic Humor, Irish American literature, Italian American literature, Ethnic Sexualities, Religion and Ethnic Literature, and Ethnicity and Critical Theory. Under his leadership, the journal reached an ever increasing spectrum of readers and scholars, and as a result played a crucial and often underappreciated role in our national discourse about ethnicity, folkculture, immigration, postcolonial writing, and many other related subjects. Joe also challenged contributors to compose cross-ethnic essays; he thereby strengthened necessary ties between scholars of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds, and fomented and complicated urgently needed discourse between and among cultures. The many graduate students he trained are keeping his legacy burning bright. He is remembered by his MELUS family—and I am quoting colleagues here—as “kind,” “generous,” “a gentleman,” “a great listener,” “a wise counselor.” He was also an engaged and wise society President. Since Joe was my best conference buddy, and we attended probably hundreds of panels together, I can affirm that he always listened carefully to presentations and often posed tactful, helpful questions; further, as MELUS editor, he would ask thrilled graduate students to send their papers to his desk for possible publication. My adventures with Joe covered many cities, at conferences both in the United States and abroad. He frequently traveled with me and my wife June before or after these conferences, in locales as diverse as Italy, Hawaii, Belgium, and France. He loved opera, blues, jazz, and theater, and was a celebrated chef. Evenings at his charming home in Belchertown were full of laughter, great food, circulating music, and wonderful stories. He gloried in his garden, his circle of friends, and his beloved relatives. This last time I saw him, at the April MELUS conference I hosted here at UGA, he was full of tales about his latest adventures and was making excited plans for the future. [End Page 6] The Estonian composer Arvo Part was once asked to name his favorite instrument; he replied “the human heart in tune.” Joe, whether he was in the classroom, at a conference, in his garden or kitchen, or at a concert, was always “in tune,” and he brought new perceptions and harmonies to everyone he encountered. The music of his life will reverberate for many of us for years to come. Click for larger view View full resolution Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. Photograph courtesy of Archie J. Brown Collection [End Page 7] John Wharton Lowe JOHN WHARTON LOWE is the Barbara Methvin Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is author of a number of books on Southern, African American, and Caribbean literature, the most recent being Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Honorary Membership Citations

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

Contributors’ Notes