The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and ...sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades.In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s.American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.
Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman ...Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's &dquoteThe Raven&dquote serve as case studies that demonstrate the authors' debt to the past. Focusing principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus, Engel avoids engaging in a simple account of what these authors read and incorporated into their own writings. Instead, through an examination of their predisposition toward an earlier model of pattern recognition, he offers fresh insight into the writers' understandings of mourning and loss, their use of allegory, and what they gained from their use of pseudonyms.
Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and ...technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College
Perhaps no one would be more shocked at the steady rise of his literary reputation-on a truly global scale-Than Edgar Allan Poe himself. Poe's literary reputation has climbed steadily since his death ...in 1849.InPoe Abroad,Lois Vines has brought together a collection of essays that document the American writer's influence on the diverse literatures-and writers-of the world. Over twenty scholars demonstrate how and why Poe has significantly influenced many of the major literary figures of the last 150 years.Part One includes studies of Poe's popularity among general readers, his influence on literary movements, and his reputation as a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. Part Two presents analyses of the role Poe played in the literary development of specific writers representing many different cultures.Poe Abroadcommemorates the 150th anniversary of Poe's death and celebrates his worldwide impact, beginning with the first literal translation of Poe into a foreign language, "The Gold-Bug"into French in 1845. Charles Baudelaire translated another Poe tale in 1848 and four years later wrote an essay that would make Poe a well-known author in Europe even before he achieved recognition in America.Poe died knowing only that some of his stories had been translated into French. He probably never would have imagined that his work would be admired and imitated as far away as Japan, China, and India or would have a lasting influence on writers such as Baudelaire, August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Tanizaki Junichiro.As we approach the sesquicentennial of his death,Poe Abroadbrings together a timely one-volume assessment of Poe's influence throughout the world.
Edgar Allan Poe continues to be a fascinating literary figure to students and scholars alike. Increasingly the focus of study pushes beyond the fright and amusement of his famous tales and seeks to ...locate the author within the culture of his time. In Poe and the Printed Word, Kevin Hayes explores the relationship between various facets of print culture and Poe's writings. His study provides a fuller picture of Poe's life and works by examining how the publishing opportunities of his time influenced his development as a writer. Hayes demonstrates how Poe employed different methods of publication as a showcase for his verse, criticism and fiction. Beginning with Poe's early exposure to the printed word, and ending with the ambitious magazine and book projects of his final years, this reappraisal of Poe's career provides an engaging account that is part biography, part literary history and part history of the book.
Edgar Allan Poe Zimmerman, Brett
Edgar Allan Poe,
c2005, 20050901, 2005, 2005-07-31
eBook
Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary ...criticism, book reviews, and marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary and rhetorical terms, presented in alphabetical order and amply illustrated with examples - in addition to close examinations of some of Poe's most important tales - overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity, putting a nearly two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by showing Poe to be a conscientious craftsman of the highest order.
Through close analysis of Eureka and The Purloined Letter, Swirski evaluates Poe's epistemological theses in the light of contemporary philosophy of science and presents literary interpretation as a ...cooperative game played by the author and reader, thereby illuminating how we read fiction. The analysis of Poe's little-studied Eureka provides the basis for his discussion of Lem's critique of scientific reductionism and futurological forecasts. Drawing on his own interviews with Lem as well as analysis of his works, Swirski considers the author's scenarios involving computers capable of creative acts and discusses their socio-cultural implications. His analysis leads to bold arguments about the nature of literature and its relation to a broad range of other disciplines.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of ...view-scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary-they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities-a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today.
Universes without Usexplores a lesser-known countertradition in American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither "other" nor "mirror." Instead, humans are enmeshed with "alien" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of "us." By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it.
Universes without Usdemonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman.
The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and ...linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.
