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Deciphering Poe

Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

Edited by Alexandra Urakova

Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a “cryptographic imagination.” Not only was Poe’s work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new modes of reading. Poe’s acclaimed complexity owes as much to a long and sophisticated tradition of his interpretative reading as it does to the “undercurrent of meaning” ciphered in his texts. Grounded in previous scholarly work, Deciphering Poe: Contexts, Subtexts, Subversive Meanings explores the hoaxing and subversive nature of Poe’s art and expands this contextual framework. Contributors to the volume offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe’s engagement in the major discourses of the time—religious, philosophical, social, and literary. Twelve essays of the collection discuss Poe’s debt to baroque tradition, his response to Catholicism, his tribute to philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception. The volume includes new readings of Poe’s texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection—“The Gold Bug,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the Dupin tales.

The essays in the collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association’s Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. The contributors are Poe scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Canada: Amy C. Branam, Lauren Curtright, Daniel Fineman, William E. Engel, John C. Havard, Henri Justin, John Edward Martin, Sean Moreland, Philip E. Phillips, Stephanie Sommerfeld, and Timothy N. Towslee.

University Press Copublishing Division / Lehigh University Press

Pages: 170 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61146-139-8 • Hardback • September 2013 • $83.00 • (£64.00)

978-1-61146-199-2 • Paperback • August 2015 • $46.99 • (£36.00)

978-1-61146-140-4 • eBook • September 2013 • $44.50 • (£34.00)

Series: Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Collections / American / General, Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance

Deciphering Poe

Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a “cryptographic imagination.” Not only was Poe’s work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new modes of reading. Poe’s acclaimed complexity owes as much to a long and sophisticated tradition of his interpretative reading as it does to the “undercurrent of meaning” ciphered in his texts. Grounded in previous scholarly work, Deciphering Poe: Contexts, Subtexts, Subversive Meanings explores the hoaxing and subversive nature of Poe’s art and expands this contextual framework. Contributors to the volume offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe’s engagement in the major discourses of the time—religious, philosophical, social, and literary. Twelve essays of the collection discuss Poe’s debt to baroque tradition, his response to Catholicism, his tribute to philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception. The volume includes new readings of Poe’s texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection—“The Gold Bug,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the Dupin tales.

The essays in the collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association’s Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. The contributors are Poe scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Canada: Amy C. Branam, Lauren Curtright, Daniel Fineman, William E. Engel, John C. Havard, Henri Justin, John Edward Martin, Sean Moreland, Philip E. Phillips, Stephanie Sommerfeld, and Timothy N. Towslee.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Lehigh University Press

Pages: 170 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61146-139-8 • Hardback • September 2013 • $83.00 • (£64.00)

978-1-61146-199-2 • Paperback • August 2015 • $46.99 • (£36.00)

978-1-61146-140-4 • eBook • September 2013 • $44.50 • (£34.00)

Series: Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Collections / American / General, Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance

Author

Alexandra Urakova works as a senior researcher at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and she is associate professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Russia, Moscow. She is the author of The Poetics of the Body in the Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (2009, in Russian).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1: Poe’s Resonance with Francis Quarles: Emblems, Melancholy, and the Art of Memory
William E. Engel

Chapter 2: “A Snare in Every Human Path”: “Tamerlane” and the Paternal Scapegoat
John Edward Martin

Chapter 3: Mother Goddess Manifestations in Poe’s “Catholic Hymn” and “Morella”
Amy Branam

Chapter 4: Poe’s 1845 Boston Lyceum Appearance Reconsidered
Philip Edward Phillips

Chapter 5: “Torture[d] into aught of the Sublime:” Poe’s Fall of the House of Burke, Ussher and Kant.
Sean Moreland

Chapter 6: Poe and Perversity
Daniel Fineman

Chapter 7: From the Romantic to the Textual Sublime: Poesque Sublimities, Romantic Irony, and Deconstruction
Stephanie Sommerfeld

Chapter 8: The Armchair Flâneur
Tim Towslee

Chapter 9: No Kidding; “The Gold-Bug” is True to its Title
Henri Justin

Chapter 10: “Trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public”: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a Hoaxical Satire of Racist Epistemologies
John C. Havard

Chapter 11: Moving Daguerreotypes and Myths of Reproduction: Poe’s Body
Lauren Curtright

Index
About the Contributors

Deciphering Poe

Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

Edited by Alexandra Urakova

Deciphering Poe

Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

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