Poes Pervasive Influence

The essays in this collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association's Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. All the essays in this volume deal with Poe's influence on authors from the United States and abroad; in addition, the collection also includes two examples of primary texts by contemporary authors whose work is directly related to Poe's work or life: an interview with Japanese detective novelist Kiyoshi Kasai and poems by Charles Cantalupo. This volume includes interpretative essays on international authors whose work reflects back on Poe’s work: Edogawa Rampo from Japan; Lu Xun from China; Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão from Portugal; Angela Carter from England; and Nikolai Gogol from Russia. The essays in this collection complement and extend a project begun by Lois Vines' Poe Abroad (University of Iowa Press, 1999) and take a wider perspective on Poe's influence with essays on Poe's impact on American authors William Faulkner, Mary Oliver, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs.

Poe and Women presents essays by scholars who investigate the various ways in which women--Poe's female contemporaries, critics, writers, and artists, as well as women characters in Poe adaptations--have shaped Edgar Allan Poe's reputation and revised his depictions of gender.

This collection of fifteen original essays and one original poem explores the theme of “place” in the life, works, and afterlife of Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849). Poe and Place argues that “place” is an important critical category through which to understand this classic American author in new and interesting ways. The geographical “places” examined include the cities in which Poe lived and worked, specific locales included in his fictional works, imaginary places featured in his writings, physical and imaginary places and spaces from which he departed and those to which he sought to return, places he claimed to have gone, and places that have embraced him as their own. The geo-critical and geo-spatial perspectives in the collection offer fresh readings of Poe and provide readers new vantage points from which to approach Poe’s life, literary works, aesthetic concerns, and cultural afterlife.

This collection explores how anthologizers and editors of Edgar Allan Poe play an integral role in shaping our conceptions of Poe as the author we have come to recognize, revere, and critique today. In the spheres of literature and popular culture, Poe wields more global influence than any other U.S. author. This influence, however, cannot be attributed solely to the quality of Poe’s texts or to his compellingly tragic biography. Rather, his continued prominence as a writer owes much to the ways that Poe has been interpreted, portrayed, and packaged by an extensive group of mediators ranging from anthologizers, editors, translators, and fellow writers to literary critics, filmmakers, musicians, and illustrators. In this volume, the work of presenting Poe’s texts for public consumption becomes a fascinating object of study in its own right, one that highlights the powerful and often overlooked influence of those who have edited, anthologized, translated, and adapted the author’s writing over the past 170 years.

This collection of essays, which rediscovers Edgar Allan Poe’s not forgotten lore, comprises a two-headed scholarly body, drawing from communication and linguistics and literature, although it also includes many other academic offshoots which explore Poe’s labyrinthine and variegated imagination. The papers are classified according to two main domains, namely: (I) Edgar Allan Poe in Language, Literature and Translation Studies, and (II) Edgar Allan Poe in Communication and the Arts. In short, this book combines rigour and modernity and pays homage, with a fresh outlook, to Poe’s extra-ordinary originality and brilliant weirdness which prompted renowned authors like James Russell Lowell and Howard P. Lovecraft to claim, respectively, that “Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius” and that “Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon lights in the province of the short story. Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.”

This biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), a giant of American literature who invented both the horror and detective genres, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant but exploited author and editor, a man who veered radically from temperance to rampant debauchery, and an agnostic who sought a return to religion at the end of his life. Acclaimed biographer Jeffrey Meyers explores the writer's turbulent life and career, including his marriage and multiple, simultaneous romances, his literary feuds, and his death at an early age under bizarre and troubling circumstances.

Winner of the 2019 Patrick F. Quinn Award for the best book on Poe (awarded by the Poe Studies Association) Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe's connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins. John Cullen Gruesser rebuts myths that continue to cling to Poe, demonstrates Poe's ability to transform themes he encountered in the works of his literary contemporaries into great literature, and establishes the profound influence of Poe's invention of detective fiction on nineteenth-century American writers.

H.P. Lovecraft, one of the twentieth century’s most important writers in the genre of horror fiction, famously referred to Edgar Allan Poe as both his “model” and his “God of Fiction.” While scholars and readers of Poe’s and Lovecraft’s work have long recognized the connection between these authors, this collection of essays is the first in-depth study to explore the complex literary relationship between Lovecraft and Poe from a variety of critical perspectives. Of the thirteen essays included in this book, some consider how Poe’s work influenced Lovecraft in important ways. Other essays explore how Lovecraft’s fictional, critical, and poetic reception of Poe irrevocably changed how Poe’s work has been understood by subsequent generations of readers and interpreters. Addressing a variety of topics ranging from the psychology of influence to racial and sexual politics, the essays in this book also consider how Lovecraft’s interpretations of Poe have informed later adaptations of both writers’ works in films by Roger Corman and fiction by Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. This collection is an indispensable resource not only for those who are interested in Poe’s and Lovecraft’s work specifically, but also for readers who wish to learn more about the modern history and evolution of Gothic, horror, and weird fiction.

Withan unconventional new perspective, Andersonidentifies Edgar Allan Poe's texts as ajourney and explores the ways Poe both encounters and transcends the realm of the material. Beginning with Poe s earliest short stories through his last fragment of imaginative prose, this book shows the path that Poe traveled as he came to understand how to transform "rudimentary" into "ultimate" life. Anderson skillfully argues that Poe s response to the existential predicament of life lies at the heart of his achievement.

Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of perspectives and take the form of historical and aesthetic considerations, gender-centered accounts, and examinations that attend to reader-response theory, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, postmodern techniques, and contemporary uses of minimalist forms. Looking ahead, this collection traces the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the Romantic writings of Poe to the postmodern developments and into the twenty-first century. This volume will prove of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of the short story and of literature in general. In addition, the readability and analytical transparence of these essays make them accessible to a more general readership interested in fiction.