Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation最新文献

{"title":"Detecting Poe in Dupin’s Detection","authors":"B. I. Weiner","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00019.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00019.X","url":null,"abstract":"R ichard Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries is a slim but ambitious volume of literary criticism. He proposes in the introduction that Dupin’s “detection may be taken as an allegory of our own potential reading,” that we may profitably employ a simulacrum of Dupin’s methods of solving crimes “to solve some of the mysteries of Poe’s detective fiction” [2]—that is, of its genesis and meaning. Whereas others have recognized the ways in which the Dupin stories (and the detective fiction they spawned) position the reader as sleuth and the sleuth as reader, usually to open a “postmodern” inquiry into Poe’s fiction, Kopley’s interest is to demonstrate the continued relevance of critical practices that have come to be regarded by some as outmoded. Thus, he finds in Dupin’s “minuteness of attention” to newspaper accounts of crime justification for a “new formalism” or “close reading” of Poe’s much-read detective tales. Similarly, he finds in Dupin’s consideration of “things outside the game,” of “collateral and circumstantial events” and “the seemingly irrelevant,” a rationale for studying sources “outside the text”—that is, for a “genetic criticism” [2-3]. Finally, Kopley suggests we mimic Dupin’s method of identifying with criminal antagonists in order to identify with Poe, both as a reader of texts (again to justify a genetic criticism) and as a person, to bring to light a biographical reading of the Dupin stories that is suggested by the sources Kopley unearths. In Dupin’s “blended critical approach” to crime solving, Kopley sees the potential of a practical criticism or, borrowing a term from David Reynolds, a “reconstructive criticism” that can lead us to a more synthetic understanding of Poe’s detective tales [5]. Kopley devotes a chapter to close readings of structural and verbal symmetries in the Dupin mysteries, three chapters to the investigation of sources (a chapter for each of the stories), and a chapter to biographical interpretation. A brief introduction and conclusion round out Kopley’s study, to which he appends a facsimile reprint of Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s edition of the Dupin stories, minus Mabbott’s headnotes and footnotes. The design is reminiscent of The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, edited by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"167 1","pages":"135 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84992288","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 Raven” as an Elegiac Paraclausithyron","authors":"Christopher F. S. Maligec","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00015.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00015.X","url":null,"abstract":"“The Raven” has spellbound readers and critics for generations with its ominous raven, the lost Lenore, and the narrator’s descent into self-torment and madness, not to mention its haunting meter and rhyme scheme. It has also inspired many to search for its literary origins.1 One previously unnoticed avenue to an enriched understanding of “The Raven” is to consider it as a type of elegiac paraclausithyron, a Greek (and Roman) poetic form consisting of the lament of an excluded, locked-out lover (exclusus amator) at the shut door of his beloved.2 Poe’s knowledge of Greek and Latin is well documented,3 so he probably would have been familiar with the paraclausithyron, which was widely known in Greek and Roman love literature—appearing not only in elegy but in genres as diverse as the lyric, epigram, idyll, pastoral, comedy, and mime.4 For Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the paraclausithyron was central to love poetry. In fact, Ovid saw poetry as the invention of the lover singing for admittance to his lady ad clausas fores (at the shut door), and Propertius made the door a synonym of love itself.5","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"33 1","pages":"87 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88081352","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":"Burton R. Pollin (1916–2009): In Memorium","authors":"B. Cantalupo","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00009.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00009.X","url":null,"abstract":"The Poe community lost one of its most generous, prolific, distinguished, and dedicated scholars on 30 June 2009, with the death of Dr. Burton R. Pollin, CUNY Emeritus Professor of English and honorary member of the Poe Studies Association. Dr. Pollin was ninety-three. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 8 May 1916, he was a graduate of City College of New York and received his PhD from Columbia University. He is survived by his wife of sixty-five years, Dr. Alice Pollin, NYU Emeritus Professor of Spanish; daughter Diana C. Pollin of Marseilles, France; son Myles C. Pollin of Manhattan; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Pollin was an accomplished pianist as well as an active member of his Bronxville community through civic contributions and especially as cofounder of the Bronxville Beautification Project. An obituary by George C. McKinnis in the Bronxville online newspaper shows us the Burton Pollin I came to know, care for, and admire:","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"10 1","pages":"4 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00009.X","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72503669","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":"Antebellum Authorship after Charvat","authors":"L. Cohen","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00018.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00018.X","url":null,"abstract":"In this wonderfully fine-grained study, Leon Jackson jettisons the categories of “professional” and “amateur” that have structured discussions of antebellum authorship since William Charvat’s influential book The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 was published posthumously in 1968. Charvat’s neat narrative, Jackson charges, is at once narrowly dualist (if you’re not a professional, you must be an amateur, and to be an amateur means you have failed to be a professional) and teleological, plotting the history of antebellum authorship as an ultimately victorious quest for professionalism. This developmental logic misses the point that amateurism “didn’t precede professionalism so much as it emerged in tandem with it . . . inasmuch as it helped define what professionalism was by reference to what it was not” [19]. Moreover, the terms hardly capture the multiple economies in which antebellum authors participated, and in their place Jackson brings to life a wide array of exchange practices, including gift giving, subscription, and literary competitions. Jackson is careful to specify what his book does and does not do. Although it is a study of literature, it is not a work of literary criticism; that is, although it is deeply analytical, it is not exactly interpretive. It is something closer to a historical anthropology of authorship, and as such, its idiom is thick description, rather than close reading. Jackson draws extensively on scholarship in the social sciences, especially the work of Karl Polanyi and other economic anthropologists, an approach that offers a richly textured picture of the literary activities of antebellum authors, editors, publishers, and readers. The focus of Jackson’s research, though, is on primary sources, and his archival work is truly breathtaking. He draws on reams of newspapers, diaries, business and personal correspondence, albums, letter-writing manuals, and publishers’ receipts, among other materials, and his research covers considerable geographic ground (North and South, although like most antebellum scholarship, it concentrates on the eastern seaboard). Yet this is not a haphazard collection of examples: they quite clearly and naturally demonstrate","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"11 1","pages":"130 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84334812","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 Genre Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection","authors":"Bonita Rhoads","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00011.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00011.X","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship of the past forty years has repeatedly demonstrated that domesticity emerged as a pervasive cultural ideology in nineteenthcentury America, promoting the feminized household as a spiritual retreat from the instrumental relations of the marketplace. “Domesticity constitutes an alternative to, and escape from, the masculine economic order,” Gillian Brown contended in 1990, recapitulating the groundbreaking studies published in the 1970s and 1980s.1 But despite all its manifest resistance to capitalism, domestic ideology and the popular fiction associated with it have also been prominently linked to consumerism. In her classic 1977 book, The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas leveled a notoriously harsh indictment against domestic ideology as the origin of mass culture. More recently, in Sentimental Materialism, Lori Merish has reexamined Douglas’s argument, offering a more even-handed consideration of the conflicted orientations and complex intellectual history by which domesticity contested the market while nevertheless supplying a crucial logic for consumerism.2 Such internal contradictions have caused a number of critics to conclude that domestic ideology was too aligned with the public sphere to maintain its credibility as a moral counterpoint to industrial society. “A persistent and fundamental paradox of American domesticity,” in Kathleen McHugh’s words, is that “[while] it was constructed ideologically from the beginning as a resistant discourse to market capitalism its resistance functioned conservatively, as an accommodation with or amelioration of threatening market forces rather than a direct contestation of them.” Yet, according to Mary P. Ryan, domesticity’s concessions to commercial culture were not static but progressive. In her account, the domestic fiction and household guidebooks of the 1820s and 1830s firmly emphasized republican frugality and practical household skills. It was only toward the 1840s and 1850s that such influential magazines as Godey’s Lady’s Book and a number of novelists shifted to a comparatively consumerist version of domestic womanhood, stressing tasteful selection over heroic self-sufficiency.3 Ryan could be seen here to suggest the beginnings of a dialectical progression of literary genre by which the heroine of “woman’s fiction” initially","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"36 1","pages":"14 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83458869","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":"Sounding the Sublime: Poe, Burke, and the (Non) Sense of Language","authors":"Dennis Pahl","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00012.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00012.X","url":null,"abstract":"A s any discussion of Poe’s aesthetics must necessarily revolve around his use of language, it may be instructive to focus, more specifically, on the way sounds operate within that language. What role do sounds play in Poe’s literary works? And how does his use of sounds become suggestive of his aesthetic goals? It was the French Symbolist poets, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, who first broached these questions in a serious way, recognizing the “music” of Poe’s writing as embodying the essence of their own literary aesthetics. Unlike Emerson, who famously dismissed his fellow American author as no more than a “jingle man,” such writers as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry all found in Poe a literary precursor, a kindred spirit who, like themselves, aspired to represent poetry’s divine musicality while, at the same time, advocating an “art-for-art” aesthetic.1 For the Symbolists, Poe’s poetry, as well as his “poetic” fictional narratives, became an example of the literary artist’s ability not only to create his visions with rich, powerful, dreamlike imagery but also to use poetic sound for transcendental effects—as a vehicle, that is, for breaking through the mundane realities of the everyday to a higher, more ethereal order of knowledge and perception. In an essay that both analyzes and praises Poe, Baudelaire says, “It is at once by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors beyond the tomb.”2 In Baudelaire’s view, Poe’s aim was to sound the spiritual and to do so, most assuredly, in a way that Emerson and his New England school of writing—what Poe sardonically refers to as the “so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists”—could not do.3 Yet while Symbolist aesthetics emphasized the way in which poetic language could, through pure musicality, transport one to a place “beyond,” one should not overlook the way Poe, for all of his ethereal interests, seems equally if not more intent on affirming the material or sensuous aspects of poetic discourse. As a writer who embraces both the material and the metaphysical, and who would, as Kenneth Hovey argues, attempt to give a sensual dimension to the soul, Poe makes clear his “materialist metaphysics,” doing so not only in works of fiction and poetry, as well as in works with specific philosophical intentions such as Eureka, but also in his compositional theory.4","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"56 1","pages":"41 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86714217","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":"Marie Louise Shew and Mrs. Maria Poe Clemm: A Photograph","authors":"P. Cohen","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00013.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00013.X","url":null,"abstract":"In 2008, I embarked on a search to locate all the descendants of Marie Louise Shew, nurse and close friend to the ailing Poe family from late 1846 to mid-1848. The current keen interest in family history and the explosion of nineteenth-century databases online make it easier now to do reverse genealogy, an invaluable strategy for locating new historical manuscripts and tidbits of family lore. My search paid off when I contacted Ann Beneduce of Princeton, New Jersey, great-granddaughter to Marie Louise Shew and the keeper of some of the family treasures. In the early decades of the twentieth century, various of Mrs. Shew’s other descendants had celebrated their connection to the Poe story and joined with Poe scholars to contribute their materials and recollections. But I had tapped into a fresh line, descended from Marie Louise’s oldest son Henry (1849-1921), a line that had not been debriefed by Thomas Ollive Mabbott or Mary Elizabeth Phillips.1 Within several months I had arranged to visit Princeton. Over Mrs. Beneduce’s mantle hung an oil portrait of a lovely young Marie Louise, appearing somewhat older than in the portrait now displayed at the Baltimore Poe House and Museum. Somewhere in this family, evidently, there was wealth and vanity enough to result in two commissioned portraits of Marie Louise done within a decade of each other. On another wall a small cluster of framed nineteenthcentury photographs displayed the youthful and handsome face of her son Henry taken sometime in the 1870s along with a picture of his young family around 1890. Nearby was a sketch of a very young girl identified as Mary (1863-c.1940), the youngest child of Marie Louise and a relation my hostess had actually known.2 A much older photograph (Fig. 1) dominated the center of this family exhibit. This striking portrait shows a large middle-aged woman dressed in somber clothes. Her long dark hair is glossed and coiled over the ears, a style common in the heyday of daguerreotypes (the 1840s to the mid-1850s). There was, unfortunately, no family lore that identified the sitter. All Mrs. Beneduce could say was that the picture had been preserved with the others, and she presumed it was some close relation. I photographed all of her pictures, and a week later, inspiration hit. Could this be a picture of Maria Poe Clemm,","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"77 1","pages":"61 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87692931","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":"Proceed with Caution: Poe in the Classroom","authors":"D. Peterson","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00021.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00021.X","url":null,"abstract":"In a notable understatement, this volume’s editors find it “noteworthy” that Poe’s appearance in the distinguished MLA Approaches to Teaching series has been long overdue. Indeed, the delay verges on the unseemly, given that the MLA has previously published more than one hundred titles, many of them devoted to American writers and works. Yet belated or grudging acknowledgment of Poe’s canonical status in the literary curriculum is less surprising than it is symptomatic. The history of Poe’s career and reception is replete with an anxious awareness of the boundaries of literary culture and the mechanics of popular appeal. The author himself, his compatriots, and later critics have been inordinately sensitive to the affective power of the written word, with the result that the extraordinary reach of Poe’s impact has been a problem, or even an embarrassment, especially to his American commentators. It is the ambition of the collection under review to demonstrate, yet again, the legitimacy of devoting serious attention to the prose and poetry of Mr. Poe. As a guide to classroom resources and pedagogical strategies, this anthology of articles is a model of its kind. In the “Materials” section, the editors have assembled a truly comprehensive and evaluative account of the key texts, secondary literature, and supplemental media and websites currently available to instructors. All levels of engagement with Poe’s legacy are honored, from Lovecraft to Lacan, including audio-visual tributes and parodies, from Rachmaninoff to Roger Corman to The Simpsons’s version of “The Raven.” The editors also deserve credit for gathering a full array of generational and ideational perspectives on Poe’s writing; the essays provide a sufficiently rich variety of scholarly advice and pedagogical practice to inspire refashioned presentations of the Poe so regularly and routinely encountered in popular culture and academic curricula. In short, the volume serves admirably the aim intended by the MLA series. It will surely help any teacher at any level to reimagine the features of Poe constructed in the classroom.","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"7 1","pages":"148 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87520222","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":"Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Poe’s Pym (and “Berenice”)","authors":"D. Ketterer","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00014.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00014.X","url":null,"abstract":"T races of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) in other literary texts are not hard to discover. Jules Verne’s Le Sphinx des glaces (1897), Charles Romyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899), and H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936) are all sequels to Pym. In Henry James’s Golden Bowl (1904), Prince Amerigo recalls the conclusion of Poe’s narrative. And while Melville does not so specifically acknowledge the influence of Pym on Moby-Dick (1851), most informed readers are now comfortable with that assumption. Following in latter-day succession, the Canadian author Yann Martel (born in Salamanca, Spain) has acknowledged, in a limited way, the influence of Pym on his successful 2001 novel Life of Pi, but the full extent of that influence has not been recognized. This essay aims at establishing the homage-style presence of Pym throughout Martel’s novel, which emerges as a kind of palimpsest text: Pym is recurrently visible beneath its surface. Martel’s novel is about a sixteen-year-old Indian boy named Pi who survives the sinking of a cargo ship (with zoo animals aboard) on a lifeboat— in the company, at first, of a spotted hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. But after the hyena has eaten the orang-utan and the zebra, and the tiger has eaten the hyena, Pi and Richard Parker are the sole occupants of the lifeboat, left to drift for over seven months in the Pacific. (Pi’s ex-zoo-owner father and his mother and brother went down with the cargo ship.) This narrative was the deserving winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2002, and the resultant publicity was swiftly accompanied by a plagiarism controversy. In the last paragraph of his “Author’s Note,” Martel affirms of his novel, “As for the spark of life, I owe it to Mr. Moacyr Scliar” [Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., 2003), xiv]. The Brazilian novelist’s Max e os Felinos (1981, published in English as Max and the Cats in 1990) is about a Jewish-German refugee who crosses the Atlantic in a boat shared with a jaguar. Martel claims not to have read Scliar’s novel before writing Life of Pi, but he had read at least one review of it. The most important source of Life of Pi—Poe’s Pym—is not mentioned in the “Author’s Note” or (in any direct way) in the novel of which the note is a part. My","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"37 1","pages":"80 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88217663","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 Colloquy of Bayard and Pearl: On Poe at 200","authors":"L. Bayard, M. Pearl","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00010.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00010.X","url":null,"abstract":"LB One of my favorite Poe stories is “William Wilson,” in which a man is stalked by his own doppelganger, from grammar school to Eton to Oxford and well into adulthood. So infuriating is this double, and such a constant reproach, that the narrator is moved finally to stab him to death—only to realize he has murdered himself. I confess, Matthew, I gave more than a passing thought to “William Wilson” when I learned you and I each had a Poe-inspired novel coming out— not just in the same month or week but on the same day (6 June 2006)! The Wilsonian precedent did not bode well. I had visions of us locked in a mutually canceling war for readers, which could end only with our joint destruction. Well, I’m glad to say it didn’t work out that way. Having gone through the review mills together and, of course, seeing our books repeatedly confused with each other, we’ve emerged from our conjoined-twin experience as friends. Poe might have been disappointed by such a humanist outcome, but I daresay he would have grinned at the thought that, two hundred years after his birth, writers are still trying to penetrate his mystery.","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"22 1","pages":"13 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81568032","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}