Striving for Attention: Furthering a Comparative Reading of Robert Browning and Edgar Allan Poe

This article explores the possible influence between certain works by Robert Browning and Edgar Allan Poe, composed and published very close in time, which deal with similar themes and share literary strategies and techniques. Although the possibility that they might have been reading each other’s work is supported by their respective correspondences with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the similarities between their works could also be attributed to literary experimentation as a means of standing out in a fiercely competitive literary market that had to pander to both popular and critical taste. This article compares the similarities in choice of tone and sensational event, as well as the use of voice in a short list of titles that coincide in both time of publication and topic, to raise the issue of influence in a controversial historical context when plagiarism and radical innovation were equally problematic.