Flight of the Raven: A Retrospective on the Scholarship of G. R. Thompson

Abstract

I am honored to present this brief overview of the scholarly career of G. R. Thompson, for the past four decades both our finest Poe critic and our foremost scholar of nineteenthcentury American narrative aesthetics. The undertaking is a formidable one, though, made daunting by the breadth and influence of his achievements and by my desire to dojustice to a dear friend, beloved by his students and colleagues, whose decency, kindness, and generosity of spirit have been legendary in the profession. Ishmael took six hundred pages to explain a whale, while simultaneously confessing that he could not. I will take considerably fewer pages to describe the work of a figurative whale. Like Ishmael, I’m doomed to fail, but as he bravely and succinctly put it, I will try. Dick Thompson first rose to prominence for his work on Edgar Allan Poe. In 1968, at the age of thirty and in only his second year as an assis tant professor at Washington State University, he founded the Poe Newskttto; which soon evolved into Poe Studies. He served as editor and then coeditor until 1979, and remains a member of the editorial board to this day. From its inception, the journal played a central role in promoting scholarship on Poe, attracting submissions from established scholars and giving many young professors who would one day become leading literary critics an early opportunity to publish. Poe Studies created a dynamic discourse community devoted to the author, as essays and notes in the journal often responded to each other, establishing exciting and productive dialogues about Poe’s work at a time when he, although nominally canonized, was still viewed as something of a hack in many quarters of the Modern Language Association. While Dick was engineering the birth and growth of the journal, his own scholarship on Poe was appearing in such venues as PMLA, A m e r i c a n Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, and Poe Studies itself. He also made his presence felt in the pages of Amen’can Literary Scholamhip, writing the “Themes, Topics, and Criticism” review chapter from 1969 to 1971, and then the Poe review chapter in 1972-74 and 1980. In addition, in 1970 he edited Harper’s Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, with a revised version in 1974, a collection that has been continuously reissued and in print ever since and that is regularly assigned in high schools and colleges. This phase of Dick’s career culminated in his first authored book, PoeS Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), which was nominated for the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. The influence and significance of PoeS Fiction cannot be overstated, for it appeared at a time when Poe scholarship was mired in a quandary. As Dick diagnosed it: