The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe

213 Pages·2003·1.15 MB·English

by  Scott Peeples

The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe
Studies in American Literature and Culture:
Literary Criticism in Perspective
About Literary Criticism in Perspective
Books in the series Literary Criticism in Perspective trace liter-
ary scholarship and criticism on major and neglected writers
alike, or on a single major work, a group of writers, a literary
school or movement. In so doing the authors — authorities
on the topic in question who are also well-versed in the prin-
ciples and history of literary criticism — address a readership
consisting of scholars, students of literature at the graduate
and undergraduate level, and the general reader. One of the
primary purposes of the series is to illuminate the nature of lit-
erary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and his-
toric currents on aesthetic judgments once thought objective
and normative.
The Afterlife of
Edgar Allan Poe
Scott Peeples
Camden House
Copyright © 2004 Scott Peeples
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2004
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
ISBN: 1–57113–218-X
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peeples, Scott.
The afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe / Scott Peeples
p. cm. — (Studies in American literature and culture. Literary criti-
cism in perspective)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–57113–218–X (Hardcover: acid-free paper)
1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849 — Criticism and interpretation —
History. 2. Fantasy literature, American — History and criticism —
Theory, etc. I. Title. II. Series
PS2638.P436 2003
818'.309 — dc22
2003017325
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
In memory of my parents

Contents
Preface ix
1: The Man That Was Used Up:
Poe’s Place in American Literature, 1849–1909 1
2: A Dream Within a Dream: Poe and Psychoanalysis 29
3: Out of Space, Out of Time:
From Early Formalism to Deconstruction 63
4: The Man of the Crowd: The Socio-Historical Poe 93
5: Lionizing: Poe as Cultural Signifier 125
Afterword: Loss of Breath: Writing Poe’s Last Days 155
A Selected List of Works by Poe 165
Works Cited 167
Index 189

Preface
TO DISCUSS POE’S AFTERLIFE is really to discuss his afterlives, since he
takes so many forms in literary criticism and other media. That’s true
of any famous, dead author, but the multiplicity of afterlives is particu-
larly pronounced in Poe’s case, partly because he is quite possibly Amer-
ica’s most famous literary figure. The films, the countless illustrated
editions and adaptations of his work, the NFL team named after his best-
known poem, the tributes of mystery writers and rock musicians, the
annual newspaper articles about the mysterious visitor to his grave or the
latest theory of his death all keep Poe in the public eye. Even so, the Poe
of 1900 differs somewhat from the Poe of 1950 or the Poe of 2003, and
the Poe of American International horror films differs from the Poe who
is alluded to in the novels of Paul Auster and Don DeLillo. There is a
similar variety of Poes in literary criticism: the romantic Southern outcast,
the patron saint of the French symbolists, the hack, the test case for
Freudian psychoanalysis, the proto-deconstructionist, the racist, the anti-
racist, and so on. For over 150 years, critics have been arguing not so
much about who Poe was but about what “Poe” is — that is to say, how
to interpret this enormous jumble of biographical and historical docu-
ments as well as poems, fictions, essays and reviews, how to give coher-
ence to a mass of often contradictory and incomplete texts.
This book is not another attempt to provide that coherence, but
rather a description of the most influential and widely debated ways of
seeing Poe, a general survey of Poe studies from Griswold’s obituary to
the year 2002. Like any survey, it is incomplete: my goal was to represent
large trends through representative works of criticism and, in the last
chapter, plays, fiction, films, and graphic art. I have tried to be more of
a storyteller than a bibliographer, often leaving things out in order to
make the story coherent but trying earnestly to provide reliable narra-
tion. For instance, I say almost nothing in the following chapters about
the heroic editorial and bibliographic work of Thomas Ollive Mabbott