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A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), son of itinerant actors, holds a secure place in the firmament of history as America's first master of suspense. Displaying scant interest in native scenes or materials, Edgar Allan Poe seems the most un-American of American writers during the era of literary nationalism; yet he was at the same time a pragmatic magazinist, fully engaged in popular culture and intensely concerned with the "republic of letters" in the United States. This Historical Guide contains an introduction that considers the tensions between Poe's "otherworldly" settings and his historically marked representations of violence, as well as a capsule biography situating Poe in his historical context. The subsequent essays in this book cover such topics as Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Poe's Sensationalism, his relationships to gender constructions, and Poe and American Privacy. The volume also includes a bibliographic essay, a chronology of Poe's life, a bibliography,
illustrations, and an index.
illustrations, and an index.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 4, 2000
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36 people want to read
About the author
J. Gerald Kennedy
34 books3 followersJ. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity and coeditor (with Jackson R. Bryer) of French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. He was advisory editor of volumes 1–3 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway, under the general editorship of Sandra Spanier, and he is coediting a forthcoming volume of Hemingway letters, the final years. He is also the author of a number of essays on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and expatriate Paris, and he edited Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. His publications on nineteenth-century American literature include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing and (with fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH) a wide-ranging cultural history, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe.
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October 11, 2020
Introduction Poe in Our Time, J. Gerald Kennedy - 4 Stars
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849: A Brief Biography, J. Gerald Kennedy - 4 Stars
A well written nicely flowing bio on Poe from his early childhood highlighting the important events and hardships that impacted his life and formed his destiny.
POE IN HIS TIME:
Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Terence Whalen - 3.5 Stars
I agree with Mr. Whalen when he quoted Poe in using his own analysis in describing whether his writing innovations were more art or environment. "By this phrase, he meant that incidents (in fiction or life) may be so intimately arranged that we cannot distinctly see, in respect to any one of them, whether that one depends from any one other, or upholds it. When it comes to his specific innovations in literary form and method, however, it is far more difficult to reconstruct a chain of historical causes and artistic effects. It is therefore worthwhile to consider the relation between art and environment in light of what Poe called adaptation or the mutuality of adaptation." (p. 85).
Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poe's Sensationalism, David Leverenz - 2.5 Stars
Leverenz outlines Poe's growth in writing style from Metzengerstein which showcased more of a conventional Gothic to his later style showcasing male self loathing. "Instead of presenting shameful gentry males as neoclassic figures of mockery, Poe links sensationalism with self-torture to make them romantic figures of sympathy. He discovers that male abjection sells." (97) " . . . in Poe's horror stories, . . . narrators crave sensations to make themselves feel real by losing control. Their minds then interpret the birth of their embodied selfhood as being spanked, assaulted, or invaded." (99) Personally I thought the essay went too deep in psychologizing detached body parts, fetishizing and male castration anxiety with Poe's horror and satire writing style. Leverenz also brought forward theories that Poe was writing about repressed Southern antebellum white male racist feelings of what he termed "counter crossings" between the white and black races. For me Poe wrote what would sell to satiate the public's desire for sensationalism. Be prepared in dealing with a lot of psycho babble in this essay. For me I was left with the feeling that sometimes overanalyzing Poe's writing can sometimes take the beauty and mystery out of them.
Poe and Nineteenth-Century Gender Constructions, Leland S. Person - 4 Stars
Pearson agrees that many authors of Poe's biography concur that the loss of Poe's mother Eliza Poe at a very early age instilled in Poe the angst of childhood bereavement and abandonment which was enhanced with the death in his youth of his foster mother Fanny Allan and his first childhood female friend Jane Standard. These early experiences with death and loss cut deep with Poe and left within him an obsession with women's deaths and their return from the grave. "On the male side, Poe's contentious relationship with John Allan, who took him in after his parents' deaths without ever legally adopting him or giving him his name, significantly influenced Poe's conception of male identity. The young Poe seemed determined to fulfill an ideal of genteel patriarchy and to define himself as a Southern gentleman—initially, by trading on the reputation of his paternal grandfather, General David Poe, and by portraying himself as the son of the genteel John Allan and then, after Allan's death, by establishing an alternative model of gentility through the medium of his writing. (129-130). "Poe's circumstances entailed a rigidly gendered mode of behavior acted out in the author's personal life and staged repeatedly in his poetry and fiction, in which Poe/the male protagonist/the I-narrator either falls into abjectly dependent relationships with dead or dying women . . ." (131). Pearson gives many examples of the pattern of loss or death and then resurrection being present in the female characters of Poe's work. In dealing with the male gender in Poe's work Pearson points out that "Poe did engage contemporaneous issues surrounding nineteenth-century manhood in his writing. He represented and often satirized many male character types. Just as his portraits of women deviate weirdly from nineteenth-century models of ideal womanhood, his depictions of men and male behavior reveal extraordinary tensions between a gentlemanly surface and volatile, even violent depths." (150). "In his tales about the lives of beautiful women, he regularly brings female characters within the dominion of the male intellect, inventorying the beautiful parts of their bodies, often reducing them to a single fetishized part or a single word, and thus representing male achievement of spectacular verbal power." (160). This emphasizes the belief Poe often expressed in the mastery of the word when building the architecture of his stories. I love Pearson's last line in summing up his essay "Poe may not have enjoyed such power in his personal and professional life, but in the separate sphere of his fiction Poe could be the [proverbial] Man." (161)
Poe and the Issue of American Piracy, Louis A. Renza - 2.5 Stars American individualism vs. conformity with societal norms was an issue in nineteenth century America as well as keeping private personal information private and not fodder for public consumption upholding a person's "right to privacy." American self need for privacy vs. the public's need to know.
Bibliographical Essay: Major Editions and Landmarks of Poe Scholarship, Scott Peeples - 4.5 Stars .
Due to the Panic of 1837 writers were faced with a tight publishing market and turned to publishing in periodicals (magazines). Lists various editions of Poe's literary works compiled by other editors, credible biographies of Poe and his critical essays. This is an extremely helpful guide to finding other references to the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849: A Brief Biography, J. Gerald Kennedy - 4 Stars
A well written nicely flowing bio on Poe from his early childhood highlighting the important events and hardships that impacted his life and formed his destiny.
POE IN HIS TIME:
Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Terence Whalen - 3.5 Stars
I agree with Mr. Whalen when he quoted Poe in using his own analysis in describing whether his writing innovations were more art or environment. "By this phrase, he meant that incidents (in fiction or life) may be so intimately arranged that we cannot distinctly see, in respect to any one of them, whether that one depends from any one other, or upholds it. When it comes to his specific innovations in literary form and method, however, it is far more difficult to reconstruct a chain of historical causes and artistic effects. It is therefore worthwhile to consider the relation between art and environment in light of what Poe called adaptation or the mutuality of adaptation." (p. 85).
Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poe's Sensationalism, David Leverenz - 2.5 Stars
Leverenz outlines Poe's growth in writing style from Metzengerstein which showcased more of a conventional Gothic to his later style showcasing male self loathing. "Instead of presenting shameful gentry males as neoclassic figures of mockery, Poe links sensationalism with self-torture to make them romantic figures of sympathy. He discovers that male abjection sells." (97) " . . . in Poe's horror stories, . . . narrators crave sensations to make themselves feel real by losing control. Their minds then interpret the birth of their embodied selfhood as being spanked, assaulted, or invaded." (99) Personally I thought the essay went too deep in psychologizing detached body parts, fetishizing and male castration anxiety with Poe's horror and satire writing style. Leverenz also brought forward theories that Poe was writing about repressed Southern antebellum white male racist feelings of what he termed "counter crossings" between the white and black races. For me Poe wrote what would sell to satiate the public's desire for sensationalism. Be prepared in dealing with a lot of psycho babble in this essay. For me I was left with the feeling that sometimes overanalyzing Poe's writing can sometimes take the beauty and mystery out of them.
Poe and Nineteenth-Century Gender Constructions, Leland S. Person - 4 Stars
Pearson agrees that many authors of Poe's biography concur that the loss of Poe's mother Eliza Poe at a very early age instilled in Poe the angst of childhood bereavement and abandonment which was enhanced with the death in his youth of his foster mother Fanny Allan and his first childhood female friend Jane Standard. These early experiences with death and loss cut deep with Poe and left within him an obsession with women's deaths and their return from the grave. "On the male side, Poe's contentious relationship with John Allan, who took him in after his parents' deaths without ever legally adopting him or giving him his name, significantly influenced Poe's conception of male identity. The young Poe seemed determined to fulfill an ideal of genteel patriarchy and to define himself as a Southern gentleman—initially, by trading on the reputation of his paternal grandfather, General David Poe, and by portraying himself as the son of the genteel John Allan and then, after Allan's death, by establishing an alternative model of gentility through the medium of his writing. (129-130). "Poe's circumstances entailed a rigidly gendered mode of behavior acted out in the author's personal life and staged repeatedly in his poetry and fiction, in which Poe/the male protagonist/the I-narrator either falls into abjectly dependent relationships with dead or dying women . . ." (131). Pearson gives many examples of the pattern of loss or death and then resurrection being present in the female characters of Poe's work. In dealing with the male gender in Poe's work Pearson points out that "Poe did engage contemporaneous issues surrounding nineteenth-century manhood in his writing. He represented and often satirized many male character types. Just as his portraits of women deviate weirdly from nineteenth-century models of ideal womanhood, his depictions of men and male behavior reveal extraordinary tensions between a gentlemanly surface and volatile, even violent depths." (150). "In his tales about the lives of beautiful women, he regularly brings female characters within the dominion of the male intellect, inventorying the beautiful parts of their bodies, often reducing them to a single fetishized part or a single word, and thus representing male achievement of spectacular verbal power." (160). This emphasizes the belief Poe often expressed in the mastery of the word when building the architecture of his stories. I love Pearson's last line in summing up his essay "Poe may not have enjoyed such power in his personal and professional life, but in the separate sphere of his fiction Poe could be the [proverbial] Man." (161)
Poe and the Issue of American Piracy, Louis A. Renza - 2.5 Stars American individualism vs. conformity with societal norms was an issue in nineteenth century America as well as keeping private personal information private and not fodder for public consumption upholding a person's "right to privacy." American self need for privacy vs. the public's need to know.
Bibliographical Essay: Major Editions and Landmarks of Poe Scholarship, Scott Peeples - 4.5 Stars .
Due to the Panic of 1837 writers were faced with a tight publishing market and turned to publishing in periodicals (magazines). Lists various editions of Poe's literary works compiled by other editors, credible biographies of Poe and his critical essays. This is an extremely helpful guide to finding other references to the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Displaying 1 of 1 review