Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation最新文献

{"title":"Who is Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”?","authors":"Steven Fink","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00034.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00034.X","url":null,"abstract":"The critical interest attending Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Man of the Crowd” has come largely in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay treating the Man of the Crowd and/or the narrator as the type of the flâneur, the desultory observer of the modern capitalist cityscape.1 Since then, it has become one of the more widely discussed and debated stories in the Poe canon. Yet while ambiguities and irresolution are clearly part of its modern appeal, I would argue that the story offers up more answers to its mysteries than have yet been acknowledged. The narrator of the story sits in a London coffeehouse observing, identifying, and classifying the passing crowds, until he is arrested by the sight of an old man and what he describes as “the absolute idiosyncracy [sic] of . . . expression” on his face (Works, 2:511).2 Unable to identify or categorize the old man, the narrator follows him through the streets of London until, after a full twenty-four hours of wandering, he finally abandons the vain attempt to comprehend the stranger. He asserts that the Man of the Crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime,” but he can penetrate the mystery no further and concludes with the remark with which he began his account, that “‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read” (Works, 2:515, 506). Poe scholars have tended to focus on the character of the narrator more than on the old man himself, and in doing so they have analyzed the various ways in which the narrator is limited, inadequate, or unreliable; yet they have tended to accept the narrator’s judgment that the old man and his crime must remain shrouded in mystery. J. Gerald Kennedy, for example, has argued that attention to the old man only obscures the real center of interest in the story, the narrator’s conflicting and irreconcilable modes of perception, and Kennedy concludes that “the man of the crowd retains the ultimate inscrutability of Melville’s white whale, symbolizing (if anything) man’s inability to ascertain, by means of reason, any absolute knowledge of the world beyond the self.”3 Similarly emphasizing the stranger’s inscrutability, Robert H. Byer writes, “Like an apparition in a dream, the old man seems to inhabit a world other than the narrator’s, one that the narrator cannot communicate with in ordinary ways yet that is ‘all-absorbing’ to him.”4 Stephen Rachman’s insightful reading of Poe’s story (which takes as foundational Benjamin’s essay on the flâneur and","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"17 1","pages":"17 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81902041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chasing Edgar: The Tourist Rhetoric of the Poe Bicentennial","authors":"J. Bowers","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00026.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00026.X","url":null,"abstract":"Edgar Allan Poe’s 200 th birthday meant big business for the retail and tourism industries. The popular clothing merchant Urban Outfitters marketed exclusive ladies’ T-shirts featuring quotations from “Alone” and “The Raven,” as well as a men’s “Edgar Allen Poe” [sic] tee emblazoned with a screen print of the author, framed by a reclining skeleton. All styles were, naturally, available in just one color—black. The U.S. Postal Service released a commemorative forty-two-cent portrait stamp, accompanied by a “limited edition commemorative copy” of “The Raven,” advertised with the less-than-catchy slogan “The Edgar Allan Poe Stamp: for Now, Not Nevermore.”1 And six American locales (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Richmond, and Sullivan’s Island) attracted literary pilgrims wishing to celebrate Poe’s bicentennial in style. From a historical standpoint, it is not surprising that such a large number of locales would try to lay claim to the author’s legacy. Though it is difficult to accurately track every move that Poe made throughout his lifetime, he, his wife Virginia, and her mother Maria Clemm occupied numerous homes in several cities. Their home life included moves from Baltimore to Richmond, from Richmond to New York City, from there to Philadelphia, and back to New York City, with several intra-city relocations.2 Through these moves, Poe unwittingly studded the East Coast with homes, commemorative plaques, statues, and other monuments to his legacy. Unlike Mark Twain, whose boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, appears in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or Henry David Thoreau, who penned Walden at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Poe’s life and work elude obvious associations with a particular point-of-origin or “home.” That is to say, they foil the “pursuit of the writer by the reader,” resisting the literary pilgrim’s longing for “the communication between readers and writers, mediated through the house and the objects it contains.”3 Poe’s tales and poems often take place in fantastical, ambiguous locales, unconnected to any identifiable originals. The houses he once occupied, now museums, feature few, if any, objects that belonged to Poe or his family—most of his personal effects were lost or sold during his many moves.","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"20 1","pages":"59 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81348638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Early Unrecorded London Variant of “The Raven”","authors":"Douglas W. Lind","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00027.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00027.X","url":null,"abstract":"A fter appearing in at least thirteen different American publications from February to May 1845 [Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, “Edgar Allan Poe–The Raven,” http://eapoe.org/works/info/pp073.htm (accessed 9 June 2010)], “The Raven” crossed the Atlantic, appearing in the 14 June 1845 issue of the Critic of London [148]. It did not emerge again in a publication of that country until early 1846 with the London edition of The Raven and Other Poems (hereinafter RAOP) [Charles F. Heartman and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe . . . , rev. ed. (Hattiesburg, MS: Book Farm, 1943), 103; also see Works, 1:359– 64, 578–82]. Shortly thereafter, the London Athenaeum reprinted the poem in its entirety within a generally negative review of RAOP in its 28 February 1846 issue [215–16]. Elizabeth Barrett claimed in an April 1846 letter to Poe that the poem “produced a sensation, a ‘fit horror’ ” [see The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 17:229]. Perhaps she was merely exaggerating the poem’s effect as a polite means of thanking Poe for dedicating RAOP to her, but assuming it did indeed create a “fit horror,” such a public reaction would had to have been the result of reprinting the poem in widely circulated magazines in addition to the limited number of copies of RAOP. Furthermore, the poem would have had to appear in a widely distributed periodical with a target audience of intellectual English ladies to reach the members of Elizabeth Barrett’s social group in sufficient number to cause such a stir. Curiously, then, at the date of her letter, the Critic and the Athenaeum are the only two recorded British periodicals that carried the text of the poem. Because the Critic version had been out for almost a year and the","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"15 1","pages":"85 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73839469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Usher’s Afterlives; or, Textual Travels with Poe","authors":"J. Edwards","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00029.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00029.X","url":null,"abstract":"The gothic has crept into every aspect of American literary and cultural studies, from analyses of Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to readings of Stephenie Meyer’s seemingly endless Twilight saga. Not only does the gothic have the power to convey social and cultural taboos (incest in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland), or the brutality of tyrants to victims (slavery and rape in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), or the spectres of history (the ghost of Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved), or internal psychological traumas (doppelgangers in Poe’s “William Wilson” [1839]). The gothic also has the power to—as Teresa Goddu elegantly puts it—“haunt back” [Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 128 and elsewhere]. The return of the repressed, the revenge of the unvanquished, the revenant who refuses to remain buried—all of these tropes move the U.S. gothic from internal psychological spaces and fantastic supernatural realms into the public political domains of Native land claims, restitution for slavery, and equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians. The manner in which these hauntings manifest themselves in political discourses and textual practices is extended in chronological terms by Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm’s Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. Ranging from “Usher” (1839) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1973), Perry and Sederholm find in what they call Poe’s “masterpiece” [vii] a set of literary themes that traverse stylistic, generic, and temporal boundaries— exerting certain dark influences on the literary future. In addition to treating Poe’s story at length, this book provides textual interpretations of works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, as well as such films as Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby. For readers interested in viewing these texts through the lens of “Usher,” Perry and Sederholm’s study will be a useful guide. It is important to see, as the authors insist, how Poe’s writing seeps into literary works grounded in a range of textual practices, from psychological horror and ghost stories to weird and haunting tales to uncanny narratives and even slasher films. In all of these forms, Perry and Sederholm perceive Poe as a gothic forefather, and they read","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"1 1","pages":"100 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88867921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A Fine Tangled Web-Work”: Revisiting Poe's Prose Henri Justin. Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose","authors":"C. L. Cassagnère","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00028.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00028.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"27 1","pages":"93-99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89463396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Arabian Romance of America in Poe’s “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”","authors":"Matthew H. Pangborn","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00025.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00025.X","url":null,"abstract":"February 1845 proving a dull month for fashion, Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book decided to forego its usual illustrations of the latest designs. It did offer, however, the account of a woman strangled to death by her husband after an argument over a bustle. As the wife’s name was Scheherazade and the author’s Edgar Allan Poe, it is unlikely any of the magazine’s fashionable female readers feared their own worst nightmares had been realized. Yet if “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” treats a topic less sensationalistic than an actual murder, it does explore public anxieties just as powerful, ones arising in the phenomenon of orientalism reaching its peak in the United States in the 1840s. Recent readings, especially of Poe’s “Ligeia” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” have examined the author’s engagement with an oriental discourse that has proven more complicated than the mere escapism or expression of everyday wisdom it was often taken to be during the period.1 According to such studies, orientalism allowed its participants to partake of “a powerful, colonial, national identity, one which linked the country with the ethnocentrism of post-Enlightenment Euroamerican culture.”2 No study of Poe’s “Scheherazade,” however, has commented on the author’s use of the discourse to mount an elaborate double parody of that national identity’s central myth, and none has studied the author’s decision to address a largely female readership through a woman narrator who is violently garroted.3 But if Poe’s story tracks the enlistment of the oriental tale in discursive attempts to construct a safe domestic space for European Americans, it also calculates the cost of that construction for both European Americans and their others. Poe’s narrator asserts from the start that there is more truth than pleasure to his tale—a truth about European Americans, not “orientals”—but it is a truth he also expects his audience will find too painful to believe.4 Poe’s story takes the form of an epilogue to the Near Eastern and Indian folktales of The Thousand and One Nights, which was introduced to the West through Antoine Galland’s French translation (1704–17) but quickly brought out in English by Grub Street hacks. Scheherazade, the original folktales’","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"71 1","pages":"35 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80038976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vigorous Currents, Painful Archives: The Production of Affect and History in Poe’s “Tale of the Ragged Mountains”","authors":"Christina L Zwarg","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00024.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00024.X","url":null,"abstract":"A s we turn to the question of pain in Poe, we might return to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, which describes how effectively his mother’s stories drained away all of his morbid symptoms.1 Given the relief attributed to the “vigorous current” of those tales, we could ask if the current coursing through Poe’s work also targets some feverish pain abroad in the land of his upbringing. Many scholars now find Poe’s engagement with painful issues of his day undeniable, particularly as they relate to traumas of slavery and the racism driving imperialism at home and abroad. Yet those same scholars continue to debate how to interpret that engagement, particularly when it takes the indirect, ghoulish, and splenetic form so characteristic of his work. If some still question whether Poe was a racist, most assume that some degree or kind of racism was unavoidable for a man of his time. While initially useful, efforts to pinpoint Poe’s position on the spectrum of racist ideologies of his day have been superseded by recognition that his writing constitutes an archive with broad implications for an anatomy of racism’s conflicted and contested operations.2 Poe exposes slavery’s impact well beyond the experience of its most immediate victims and perpetrators, and this extended traumatic environment generates a range of response whose effects are worth studying with care. This last is particularly the case when we discover how often the vigorous currents of Poe’s work invite us to consider the broader traumatic relays alive in their very production. Thus if we consider the deeper resonances of Benjamin’s association between storytelling and pain, we may find another way to approach some of the","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"52 1","pages":"33 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87957398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poe’s Style: From “A” to Zimmerman","authors":"Kent P. Ljungquist","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00020.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00020.X","url":null,"abstract":"Even critics and scholars disposed to acknowledge Poe’s signal achievements—his contributions to the gothic tradition, his pioneering efforts in the short-tale genre, and his impact on the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements—have sometimes been tepid in their evaluations of his prose style. While Brett Zimmerman does, in his illuminating study, quote or mention most of what he calls Poe’s most “censorious inquisitors,” including Mark Twain, Henry James, Yvor Winters, T. S. Eliot, Julian Symons, and Harold Bloom, he does not engage in a point-by-point refutation. The tone throughout this examination of stylistic and rhetorical strategies is affirmative rather than defensive: Zimmerman convincingly argues that Poe’s prose is more varied and nuanced than his detractors claim by highlighting the way he matches language to the agitated moods, manias, and obsessions of his characters. Previous commentators, to be sure, have anticipated Zimmerman’s general point, but the painstaking demonstration of his thesis through five thoroughly detailed chapters—supported by an extensive catalog of Poe’s rhetorical devices—adds rich texture to his overall argument and advances our understanding of several key works in the Poe canon. It may not strike readers as original to pair for analysis, as Zimmerman does in his second chapter, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” a linkage that invites examination of two deranged narrators who appear to use reason to defend horrific acts. But Zimmerman’s essential distinction between the outer-directed appeal of the speaker in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” reflecting an attempt to persuade an audience, and the more inner-directed rhetoric of the narrator in “The Black Cat” seems valid. The latter narrator appears to struggle to convince himself that there is a natural set of reasons for what transpires in the tale. His repeated recourse to the language of folklore, religion, and the supernatural suggests a growing internal terror that belies his indirect or defensive references to witches and his denial of demonic agency. Contrary to interpretations of the tale that view the references to superstitions and nightmares about cats and devils as window dressing or gothic cliché, Zimmerman","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"18 1","pages":"144 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88536600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Examining Poe's Critical Theory STUART LEVINE AND SUSAN F. LEVINE, EDS., Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory, the Major Documents","authors":"Jeffrey A. Savoye","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00017.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00017.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"26 1","pages":"113-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90705181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poe's Letters Redux JOHN WARD OSTROM, BURTON R. POLLIN, AND JEFFREY A. SAVOYE, EDS., The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe","authors":"A. Hammond","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00016.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00016.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"13 1","pages":"100-112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78950665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}