Poe's Work Research Articles

The Influence of Place on Identity in Poe's “Morella” and “William Wilson”

Abstract Of the many haunting figures that Gothic fiction invokes, none so perfectly encapsulates the mode itself, in all its fantastic incursions of opposing forces and clashing sensibilities, as the literary double. Indeed, the double in Gothic literature helps to push the bounds of subjective tension so central to the genre, as subject and object are most urgently and forebodingly called into question when they appear seemingly identical and disturbingly interchangeable. Poe's mastery of this delicate subjective interplay goes without question. This article complicates the readings of two of Poe's overt doppelgänger tales, “Morella” and “William Wilson,” by factoring the influence of place into the equation of selfhood at the heart of each tale. In exploring Poe's subjective project as a fundamentally spatial one, it suggests that Poe's doubles work in concert with the liminal places they occupy in order to orient the self in more profound ways. Aware of the philosophical work of his contemporaries, Poe utilizes necessarily liminal places in both of these tales as a means to continue this work from a literary direction; Poe's interstitial places work as heterotopic mirrors, therefore offering symbolic terrain for interrogating the limits of subjectivity, while yielding a nuanced critique of the discovery and designation of the self in psychological and literary landscapes.

Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture

Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture

Stuart Levine (1932–2016)

Stuart Levine (1932–2016)

Transatlantic Poe: Eliot, Williams, and Huxley, Readers of the French Poe

Transatlantic Poe: Eliot, Williams, and Huxley, Readers of the French Poe

Borges's Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America

Borges's Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America

Borges's Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America

Borges's Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America

The Annotated Poe

The Annotated Poe

The Annotated Poe

The Annotated Poe

Translated Poe

Translated Poe

Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore

Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore

Bradford, Adam C. Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning [review

ADAM C. BRADFORD, Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. xiv + 248 pp.For those accustomed to the conventional literary wisdom that Walt Whitman's primary mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adam Bradford's Communities of Death may prove startling. Bradford puts forward the audacious thesis that instead of Emerson's Transcendentalist work, Poe's macabre work served to inspire Whitman's most ambitious poetic projects. Contending not only that Poe influenced Whitman, Bradford asserts that Poe was responsible for Whitman's most crucial achievements in both democratic and spiritual poetics; Whitman developed a democratic vision by drawing upon the importance of communal mourning, and a spiritual vision by drawing upon the material proximity of the deceased. Bradford states that Whitman repeatedly testified to the oddly recuperative potential of Poe's Gothic and macabre literature and claimed that it played a central role in spurring him to produce the rather remarkably transcendent Leaves of Grass (6). Central to this argument is the need to see both poets as their contemporaries did, specifically in terms of the cultural work of mourning.That we have largely failed to see the recuperative aspects of Poe's poems and stories in our time is due to our removal from and uneasiness the nineteenth-century practices of prizing attachment, including bodily attachment, to the deceased. Early twentieth-century Freudian conceptions of grief work posited detachment from the dead as the way to reach a healthy reintegration of the self in mourning, but nineteenth-century conventions conceived of attachment as desirable because it signaled a healthy relationship the dead, and could even extend the relationship into the afterlife. Antebellum mourning depended upon culturally sanctioned rituals that drew mourners into involvement members of the community by way of the crucial rituals of making and exchanging material objects of mourning.Bradford's examination of this nineteenth-century material culture in terms of poetics is the most valuable of many astute contributions in Communities of Death. His examination will most likely be of interest to any historian of nineteenth-century literature that deals representations of death and absence-in other words, a great deal of it. Antebellum materials of mourning were drawn from close contact the dead, and included such objects as weavings made from the hair of the deceased, memorial quilts, mourning portraits, jewelry made from the deceased's effects, photography (of the corpse), and consolation poetry inscribed on urns, headstones, and the like. These items, perhaps distasteful to us, were hardly perceived as such during the period and, indeed, aided in the active remembering that might enable a survivor to be in the continued presence of the departed. items connected family members, friends, and communities, strengthening and renewing social ties; not simply mementos, the items served as potent talismans, and were seen as salubrious in preventing separation from the departed for years, or even a lifetime.Bradford investigates the role of these funerary materials to show how Poe's audience read his work with a sense of empathetic commiseration as opposed to shock and horror, making these poems into invaluable tools [for the] bereaved (13). To immerse oneself in such mortuary details and reread poems like Annabel Lee and The Raven under Bradford's tutelage is to discover a different Poe from the one we may have thought we knew. speakers of these and others of Poe's poems do not engage in morbid activities but rather perform accepted nineteenth-century rituals of mourning that allowed access to the bodies of the dead, expressing grief in what were seen as healthy and natural ways. Poe's readers were affected because they approached the text an understanding of grief that made allowance for these types of otherwise unconventional thoughts and behavior (43). …

Another French Face

Abstract This essay examines Maurice Rollinat's translations and musical settings for Poe's “Eldorado” and “A Dream.” A prolific poet and composer, Rollinat was noted for his virtuoso performances on piano of his own poems and those of Baudelaire and Poe. The essay seeks to place him in context as a disciple of both Charles Baudelaire and Poe and to illuminate his role in interpreting Poe's work for French audiences in Paris salons and cabarets during the late nineteenth century. Rollinat was a devotee of Poe's works, but he was more liberal than either Baudelaire or Mallarmé in adapting Poe's work in translation and for musical performance. His adaptations show that he was especially sympathetic to Poe's idealistic yet melancholy equation of poetry and music.

“My Heart Laid Bare”

Abstract In 1848 in Graham's Magazine Poe argued that there is one “little book” that no one will ever dare, or ever be able, to write: a true and complete autobiography. Poe contends that this book should be titled “My Heart Laid Bare” and adds that if someone attempted to write it, the page “would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.” Throughout his literary career, Poe actually wrote this book in increments as isolated passages in his poems, short stories, essays and reviews, and letters. These passages are not only candid and revealing of Poe's true nature and reflect various events in his life; they are often, even when embedded in prose works, effectively poetic and lyrical. Taken as a whole, they constitute an autobiographical poem, a beautifully phrased portrait of Poe as he conceived of himself, along with his conception of the role of the poet. This is a poem well worth extracting from Poe's work, for it is the seemingly impossible little book Poe actually did write over his entire career; it is his heart laid bare.

From “The Raven” to “Le Cygne” Birds, Transcendence, and the Uncanny in Poe and Baudelaire

Abstract Birds are centrally emblematic in both Baudelaire's and Poe's work. During his lifetime Poe was already known as “the author of ‘The Raven’” (this poem was the only one of Poe's poems Baudelaire translated [or rather, paraphrased, in prose], making it the focus for subsequent French readers); while Baudelaire's “L'Albatros” and especially “Le Cygne” encapsulate both his own position as an artist and a wider alienation within, and from, modernity. Taking as its point of contrast the traditional, beatific connotations of birds in the poets’ predecessors and contemporaries, this article seeks to situate the specificity of avian images in Poe and Baudelaire, placing these images within the dualism of presence and absence, plenitude and abjection, relativity and transcendence central to both authors.

Poe Writing/Writing Poe

Poe Writing/Writing Poe

Poe's Pervasive Influence

Poe's Pervasive Influence

From “Al Aaraaf” to the Universe of Stars

Abstract This paper traces the patterns of Poe's cosmological thinking from the Romantic science fiction of “Al Aaraaf” (1829) at the outset of his career to the poetic cosmology of Eureka (1848) at the end of his career. In particular, I am concerned with the ways that Poe incorporated Koranic, scientific, and aesthetic elements to imagine medial spaces as a place to conduct his poetic, literary, and cosmological practice. As the 1829 headnote to “Al Aaraaf” informs the reader: “Al Aaraaf, among the Arabians, a medium between Heaven and Hell, is supposed to be located in the celebrated star discovered by Tycho Brahe, which burst forth in one night upon the eyes of the world, and disappeared as suddenly.” This article addresses the implications of the occupation of medial spaces such as “Al Aaraaf” in Poe's work in two directions: the aesthetic and the cosmological. In terms of aesthetics these medial spaces lead Poe to considerations of the Arabesque as cultural figure and aesthetic pattern he would deploy and redeploy as he moved from poetry to short fiction with direct consequences for his treatment of the grotesque, the category that would come to dominate his reputation. In terms of cosmology, these medial spaces would return in Eureka (and in other moments in his work), as a central area of consideration in his theory of the generation and fate of the universe.

A Comic Poe in French

Abstract Edgar Poe's visions and images have been nourishing the European visual arts ever since the nineteenth century (e.g., Doré, Rossetti, Beardsley, Monet, Redon), and the creative impulse is still powerful in the ninth art of the last decades. From Lalio and Battaglia to recent adaptations in French and albums featuring Poe as a fictional character, the European comic is exploiting the mine of Poe's literary work, and although the macabre seems prevalent, it is not the only element that can be extracted. The light side of Poe is growing visible when studying these comics: first of all, from the point of view of the gallows humor and the grotesque (Battaglia: “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”); second, in regard to comic situations and visual jokes (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Céka&Clod, “The Gold-Bug” by Corbeyran, and “The Oval Portrait” by Somon); and lastly with the games of intertextuality and the vision of Poe as a benefactor of humankind in Tarek&Morinière's Baudelaire ou le roman rêvé d'E. A. Poe (Baudelaire or a Novel Dreamt by E. A. Poe) and Vilà&Collignon's Edgar Poe: Le dernier cauchemar (Edgar Poe: The Last Nightmare). The visual interpretations magnify the comic, humorous, or life-affirming potential of Poe's texts. Playing with Poe's images is so powerful that even the openly macabre intention of such illustrators as Lacombre take on the turn of black humor or childish games. Thus comic images overshadow and ward off the tragedy of death.

Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

Revolution of Thought/Revulsion of Feeling: Edgar Allan Poe and the Interest Concept

Style to idea is li\e enamel to tooth.-Victor Hugo, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe, Critical Notices, Southern Literary Messenger (1835)1[RJeally valuable ideas can only be had at price of close attention.-Charles Sanders Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1992)2There is no indifference to material reality in Edgar Allan Poe's writing, despite an older critical tradition that took his well-known opposition to the heresy of Didactic to suggest otherwise.3 Poe's protagonists-his lovers, his criminals, his cadavers and near-cadavers-almost always suffer from a variation of nervous intensity of that leads Egaeus to fixate with ultimately disastrous consequences on teeth of his eponymous beloved in Berenice, tale at center of my analysis in this essay.4 In his cosmological essays and his tales of mesmerism, Poe's narrators and dialogists evince what Agathos, in The Power of Words, describes as a deep in dizzying connectedness of material universe.5 In his critical essays and reviews, too, Poe displays an abiding concern with ways that readers invest, sustain, and are rewarded for their in reading, material response to which he names the poetic effect. In all these instances of interest in Poe's work, foundations of disinterested aesthetic contemplation are being unsettled. But, as I will argue in this essay, Poe's critique of disinterested contemplation should be read as a conformation or adaptation of category of aesthetic rather than a rejection of it. If, as Friedrich Schlegel observed near end of eighteenth century, aesthetic turn toward das Interessante was coeval with historical emergence of novel, Poe goes a step further by celebrating, in his own analyses of psychological implications of Modernity on literary form, forceful brevity and unity or totality of effect associated with short prose tale:6 During hour of perusal, he explains in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales, the soul of reader is at writer's control.7 Readerly interest-and not disinterest, more famous prerequisite of aesthetic judgment- turns out to be key term for engaging Poe's aesthetics of literary commodity.Some Poe scholars, including Meredith McGill and Terence Whalen, have minimized significance and originality of Poe's aesthetic theories, focusing instead on ways his work responded to market instabilities, cultures of piracy and reprinting, and other contingencies of antebellum authorship, as a kind of corrective to long-running (and mostly Continental) trend of viewing Poe as an aesthete and an isolato (to borrow Herman Melville's descriptor of himself and Hawthorne).8 Without contesting any of these historicizations, however, I'd like to suggest that Poe's most enduring and innovative responses to what Jonathan Elmer calls figure of mass print culture are aesthetic ones-that is, responses that treat aesthetic as a field for experimentation with new circumstances of authorship in antebellum United States.9 This essay argues that Poe's theory of interest-which he develops through a pattern of counterpoints to Kantian disinterest-constitutes one such significant structure of response to bewildering state of aesthetic contemplation in mass culture. Poe's writing can be figured, then, at nexus of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses that are grounded through Immanuel Kant's disinterested and subjectively universal power of judgment and an emergent nineteenth-century aesthetics of that is antifoundational and more differentiable in its effects than Kantian scheme.A surprising consequence of Poe's aesthetic adaptations, which I also examine, is that his theory of ends up resonating with some of later-nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in American thought that have come to be grouped as Pragmatism; pragmatists' recurring attention to interest, in this sense, can be understood as continuous-both conceptually and historically-with Poe's own interested manipulations of eighteenth-century category of aesthetic. …