Critical Insights: Edgar Allan Poe Reviews
In the preliminary section, “About This Volume,” the editor, Robert C. Evans, outlines the arguments of all included essays and the critical approaches each author has applied to analyze Poe’s work. This essay serves as a roadmap for the whole book and is useful in helping Poe researchers find the sections most relevant to their own areas of interest. For more casual readers, this essay is also of value as it introduces and details the various critical approaches that literary critics have employed to analyze and historicize Poe’s work.
The volume begins with a useful introductory essay by Kevin J. Hayes, who elaborates on Poe’s use of the griffin (a mythological creature that contains the features of lions, eagles, and serpents) as a metaphor to define his creative process. Hayes posits that Poe rejects Coleridge’s theory of distinction between the roles of fancy and imagination and stresses that all these elements play a vital part in creativity and are equally important. A brief biography of Poe follows the introduction.
The second section, titled “Critical Contexts,” delineates the less explored events of Poe’s life. In this section, three essays by Evans analyze the historical context of Poe’s work via a thorough examination of primary sources contemporaneous with Poe’s literary career. In the first essay, “The Great New York Fire of 1845 and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Bells,’” Evans historicizes some of the major events that transpired during Poe’s residential period in New York, such as the two major fires that occurred in 1845. Reports from the New York Herald, excerpts from George P. Littles’s Fireman’s Own Book, and illustrations of the “Great Conflagration at New York” are used to contextualize Poe’s “The Bells,” and Evans argues that Poe might have referred to those events in the poem. Evans’s next essay circles back to the connection between Poe’s “The Bells” and the conflagrations that engulfed New York. He provides further evidence for the connection by elaborating that in the poem, Poe has used onomatopoeia, or imitating sounds in words, to create the sound effect of a fire alarm. Keeping this connection in mind, Evans explores publications from 1858 to 1912 that contain illustrations of fire scenes inspired by Poe’s poem. Evans shifts focus in his third essay when he compares the early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century illustrations of Poe’s “Murder in the Rue Morgue” in various print media sources to highlight the evolution of the depictions of Poe’s work. These three essays together present Poe’s work from a visual and artistic perspective, provide nuanced insights, and are useful to literary scholars as they expertly demonstrate a new strategy in the utilization of illustrations to analyze Poe’s literature.
Joyce Ann’s essay conducts a survey of the critical reception of Poe’s work, with a focus on The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Hayes. Ann delineates that literary critics such as Daniel Royot, Teresa Goddu, and Karen Weekes focus on Poe’s use of literary persona, aesthetic theory, and humor, along with the notion that he created the genre of detective fiction. Ann suggests that the overall premise of the volume is Poe’s status as a cultural icon and avant-garde thinker and how this reputation was established. This essay is extremely helpful for graduate students, Poe researchers, and instructors because it describes in detail the main arguments of prominent Poe essays and the critical lens that various authors have employed to evaluate Poe’s tales and poetry.
The third section, “Critical Readings,” consists of eleven essays that provide various critical perspectives on Poe’s work. The similarity among each is that the authors start by presenting the larger historical and literary context of their arguments, then narrow their focus down to the critical analysis of Poe. For example, the first essay, “Oedipus, Othello, and Dupin,” draws from various classical works of Renaissance literature to explore the role of luck and chance in these works. The first half of the essay is based on close readings of Oedipus and Othello and the role of chance in their lives, and then the discussion moves on to explore the role chance plays in the murder mystery of the “Rue Morgue.”
"Sandra M. Leonardo, in her two subsequent essays, brings to light the copyright issues of early nineteenth-century print culture. She deals with the highly controversial topic of Poe’s accusation of plagiarism against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She asserts that Poe was a staunch believer in the originality of a work of literature, which he clarifies in his “Philosophy of Composition,” a work detailing his creative process. Leonard helpfully articulates the details of publication culture, the status of authors, and the issue of plagiarism in early nineteenth-century America, which will be most useful for researchers and literary scholars who employ the lens of New Historicism as a research methodology.
Moving to gender representations in Poe, Tracy L. Hayes examines how men “other” women because of their own insecurity about feminine monstrosity in “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In these stories, as a consequence of male aggression, women become unheimlich, or uncanny, and Poe takes this idea to the extreme. Similarly, Sarah Fredericks in “Pulling Poe’s Teeth” examines the overarching connection between teeth, gender, and sexuality. She historicizes the nineteenth-century fascination with teeth by including examples of the establishment of the first dental school in Baltimore and Darwin’s description of the functionality of teeth. She posits that the detailed description of teeth and Egaeus’s obsession with Berenice’s teeth represent associations among the material self, projected self, psychological complexities, and suppressed sexual desires. These two pieces provide trenchant insights into the darker aspects of Poe’s representation of women, with a focus on the themes of female monstrosity, physicality, and sexuality in his works.
Murray S. Ellison analyzes Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess Player” and argues that he was cognizant of the scientific progress of his era, but his attitude toward it is ambivalent. It is difficult to fathom whether Poe eulogized scientific progress or rejected it altogether, but one thing remains obvious: that he explored the intricacies between the world of science, mechanics, and Romanticism. The inclusion of early and current illustrations of chess machines enhances readers’ interest in this essay. The next essay, by S. G. Ellerhoff, builds on the idea of Poe’s use of the grotesque to posit that “King Pest” holds a unique position in Poe’s work because the tale is pluralistic in nature and readers can interpret it according to their understanding. Poe uses the grotesque in a way that “both dampens and, conversely, heightens the story’s Gothic elements and humor” (280). Toward the end of the essay, Ellerhoff also draws a parallel between COVID-19 and “King Pest.” These two essays, which highlight Poe’s awareness of anxieties concerning scientific progress and pandemics in the common consciousness, effectively establish the relevance of his work to the current era.
The close reading of illustrations reemerges in Evans’s fourth essay, in which he critically analyzes and performs close readings of the illustrations of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” produced between 1884 and 1935. He posits that differences in the positioning of rats, the saw, and the body in illustrations strongly suggest how artists perceived and visualized the story. This essay emphasizes the importance of reader-response theory in analyzing the visual representations of literature. In the section’s final essay, Darren Harris-Fain discusses the classical and biblical allusions in “The Raven” and contends that Poe’s attitude toward religion remains ambivalent because the speaker in “The Raven” is not certain that he will meet Lenore in heaven. This essay can be a valuable source for a researcher who intends to analyze Poe’s work from a religious angle."
"...This volume is set apart by its illumination of the lesser-known aspects of Poe’s life, which can bring valuable new insights to literary scholars and opportunities on which to build their research. Overall, the volume is a worthy contribution to the field of Poe studies, covering a wide swath of Poe’s work, including his poetry, detective fiction, and Gothic tales, through a variety of traditional and novel analytical techniques."
- The Edgar Allan Poe Review, November 2023