POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

Abstract

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, The Literati of New York City (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of every person of literary note in (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early Autography installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the Autography series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the Literati. All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …