Edgar Allan Poe Poe In The Nineteenth Century

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe's connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins. John Cullen Gruesser rebuts myths that continue to cling to Poe, demonstrates Poe's ability to transform themes he encountered in the works of his literary contemporaries into great literature, and establishes the profound influence of Poe's invention of detective fiction on nineteenth-century American writers.

The End of the World in Poe provides the sociological circumstances in which certain works of Edgar Allan Poe were composed. The selected works are "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839), "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841), "The Power of Words" (1845), and "Review of Stephens' 'Arabia Petraea'" (1837). Dr. Yeagley's analysis of these works offers authentic literary criticism based on detail afforded only by intimate understanding of the sociological circumstances in which the works were written. Though Poe is not generally associated with genuine religious sentiment, the three short stories and one essay examined in Dr. Yeagley's text demonstrate that Poe was in fact deeply familiar with the theological and apocalypitcal trends of the mid-19th century. Poe was in fact sincere in his respect and response to the Biblical world view.

Winner of the 2019 Patrick F. Quinn Award for the best book on Poe (awarded by the Poe Studies Association) Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe's connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins. John Cullen Gruesser rebuts myths that continue to cling to Poe, demonstrates Poe's ability to transform themes he encountered in the works of his literary contemporaries into great literature, and establishes the profound influence of Poe's invention of detective fiction on nineteenth-century American writers.

Although there have been over 700 illustrators of Poe’s work over the past two centuries, this book chooses to examine only the best of them. Beginning with the French in the nineteenth century and tracing the great illustrators of Poe to the present, this book not only provides close analyses of individual visualizations but also seeks to supply an art history context to understanding their emergence. The majority of the artists featured remain unknown, even to Poe scholars, although their artwork represents iterations inspired by the most famous of Poe’s poems and stories. In some cases, the illustrations helped increase the visibility of particular Poe works and to make them part of the international Poe canon. A few of the illustrators featured in this book (e.g., Manet, Doré, Redon, Beardsley) are recognized among the most famous artists in the world. Others, such as Martini and Blumenschein, while remaining minor figures in art history, nevertheless produced immortal work based on Poe’s fiction and poetry. While still other visual artists represented here (Rackham, Dulac, Clarke) achieved artistic fame as book illustrators based on homages to other writers and fairy tales in combination with their Poe studies; their work on Poe, however, helped to solidify their larger reputations as professional illustrators. The last chapter extends traditional visualizations influenced by Poe to include his impact on twentieth- and twenty-first century filmmakers and cartoonists. They, too, found in Poe’s writing either a source for direct re-creation or an inspiration for their own atmospheric excursions into the bizarre, the exotic, and the psychologically complex.

Most frequently regarded as a writer of the supernatural, Poe was actually among the most versatile of American authors, writing social satire, comic hoaxes, mystery stories, science fiction, prose poems, literary criticism and theory, and even a play. As a journalist and editor, Poe was closely in touch with the social, political, and cultural trends of nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has linked Poe's imaginative writings to the historical realities of nineteenth-century America, including to science and technology, wars and politics, the cult of death and bereavement, and, most controversially, to slavery and stereotyped attitudes toward women. Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism presents a systematic approach to topical criticism of Poe, revealing a new portrait of Poe as an author who blended topics of intellectual and social importance and returned repeatedly to these ideas in different works and using different aesthetic strategies during his brief but highly productive career. Twelve essays point readers toward new ways of considering Poe's themes, techniques, and aesthetic preoccupations by looking at Poe in the context of landscapes, domestic interiors, slavery, prosody, Eastern cultures, optical sciences, Gothicism, and literary competitions, clubs, and reviewing.

No American author of the early 19th century enjoys a larger international audience than Edgar Allan Poe. Widely translated, read, and studied, he occupies an iconic place in global culture. Such acclaim would have gratified Poe, who deliberately wrote for "the world at large" and mocked the provincialism of strictly nationalistic themes. Partly for this reason, early literary historians cast Poe as an outsider, regarding his dark fantasies as extraneous to American life and experience. Only in the 20th century did Poe finally gain a prominent place in the national canon. Changing critical approaches have deepened our understanding of Poe's complexity and revealed an author who defies easy classification. New models of interpretation have excited fresh debates about his essential genius, his subversive imagination, his cultural insight, and his ultimate impact, urging an expansive reconsideration of his literary achievement. Edited by leading experts J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, this volume presents a sweeping reexamination of Poe's work. Forty-five distinguished scholars address Poe's troubled life and checkered career as a "magazinist," his poetry and prose, and his reviews, essays, opinions, and marginalia. The chapters provide fresh insights into Poe's lasting impact on subsequent literature, music, art, comics, and film and illuminate his radical conception of the universe, science, and the human mind. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking, this Handbook reveals a thoroughly modern Poe, whose timeless fables of peril and loss will continue to attract new generations of readers and scholars.