The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe

Front Cover
Shawn James Rosenheim, Stephen Rachman
JHU Press, 1995 M08 28 - 364 pages

"The problem of Poe's place in American culture cannot be settled canonically, since, unlike the works of Melville or Hawthorne, Poe's texts have not been primarily transmitted through the schools. Indeed, at its most radical level, the failure of criticism to account for the remarkable diversity of Poe's influence leads one to question the utility of the canon itself as an instrument for the study of American culture."—from the Introduction

The contributors to this volume share the conviction that Poe is central to current work on American culture—and that strictly theoretical approaches to Poe have become increasingly irrelevant. Aiming to transform his place in the American canon, they bring sophisticated theoretical awareness to bear on the particular historical, social, political, and economic circumstances of his literary career. Their essays offer new insights into the complex and unavoidable relations between traditionally literary issues and the broader aspects of a democratic mass culture. The contributors are Gillian Brown, Stanley Cavell, Eva Cherniavsky, Joan Dayan, Jonathan Elmer, John T. Irwin, Barbara Johnson, David Leverenz, Meredith L. McGill, Stephen Rachman, Louis A. Renza, Shawn Rosenheim, and Laura Saltz.

 

Contents

Being Odd Getting Even Descartes Emerson Poe
3
Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature
37
Terminate or Liquidate? Poe Sensationalism and
91
Poe versus Stowe
121
Locked Rooms and Labyrinths
139
Detective Fiction Psychoanalysis and the Analytic Sublime
153
Poe Ladies and Slaves
179
Poe and Gentry Virginia
210
Recovering the Body of Marie Rogêt
237
Poe Literary Nationalism and Authorial Identity
271
Poetic Politics in The Island of the Fay
305
The Poetics of Extinction
330
Works Cited
345
List of Contributors
363
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About the author (1995)

Shawn J. Rosenheim is an associate professor of English at Williams College. He is the author of The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet, also available from Johns Hopkins. Stephen Rachman teaches in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

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