BiblioVault - Books about Poe

Certain Concealments

Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Dana Medoro

University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Antebellum America saw a great upsurge in abortion, driven in part by the rise of the pharmaceutical industry. Unsurprisingly, the practice became increasingly visible in the popular culture and literature of the era, appearing openly in advertisements, popular fiction, and newspaper reports. One figure would come to dominate national headlines from the 1840s onward: Madame Restell. Facing public condemnation and mob attacks at her home for her dogged support of women’s reproductive rights, Restell built an empire selling her powders, pills, and services along the Eastern Seaboard.

Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne undoubtedly knew of Restell’s work and would go on to depict the incompatibility of abortion and nationalism in their writings. Through the thwarted plotlines, genealogical interruptions, and terminated ideas of Poe’s Dupin trilogy and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, these authors consider new concepts around race, reproduction, and American exceptionalism. Dana Medoro demonstrates that their work can be usefully read in the context of debates on fetal life and personhood that circulated in the era.

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Communities of Death

Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning

Adam C. Bradford

University of Missouri Press, 2014

To 21st century readers, 19th century depictions of death look macabre if not maudlin—the mourning portraits and quilts, the postmortem daguerreotypes, and the memorial jewelry now hopelessly, if not morbidly, distressing. Yet this sentimental culture of mourning and memorializing provided opportunities to the bereaved to assert deeply held beliefs, forge social connections, and advocate for social and political change. This culture also permeated the literature of the day, especially the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. In Communities of Death, Adam C. Bradford explores the ways in which the ideas, rituals, and practices of mourning were central to the work of both authors.

While both Poe and Whitman were heavily influenced by the mourning culture of their time, their use of it differed. Poe focused on the tendency of mourners to cling to anything that could remind them of their lost loved ones; Whitman focused not on the mourner but on the soul’s immortality, positing an inevitable reunion. Yet Whitman repeatedly testified that Poe’s Gothic and macabre literature played a central role in spurring him to produce the transcendent Leaves of Grass.

By unveiling a heretofore marginalized literary relationship between Poe and Whitman, Bradford rewrites our understanding of these authors and suggests a more intimate relationship among sentimentalism, romanticism, and transcendentalism than has previously been recognized. Bradford’s insights into the culture and lives of Poe and Whitman will change readers’ understanding of both literary icons.

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On Poe

The Best from American Literature

Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, eds.

Duke University Press, 1993

From 1929 to the latest issue, American Literature has been the foremost journal expressing the findings of those who study our national literature. The journal has published the best work of literary historians, critics, and bibliographers, ranging from the founders of the discipline to the best current critics and researchers. The longevity of this excellence lends a special distinction to the articles in American Literature.
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.

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Poe

A Critical Study

Edward H. Davidson

Harvard University Press

Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts

Transition States in the American Renaissance

Bruce Mills

University of Missouri Press, 2005

In Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts, Bruce Mills examines how the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller draw from representations of and theories concerning animal magnetism, somnambulism, or hypnosis rendered in newspapers, literary and medical journals, pamphlets, and books. Although some recent studies have begun to consider the relevance of animal magnetism or mesmerism to nineteenth-century literature and culture, this book moves more deeply into what might be termed the canon of mesmeric study.

Through the works of Poe and Fuller, Mills argues, we can more fully understand the era’s response to dynamic cultural forces. Rather than simply using “American” subject matter as demanded in early calls for a national literature, Poe and Fuller, as well as Lydia Maria Child and Walt Whitman, increasingly rooted their epistemology and literary forms in psychological findings that accommodated the fluidity of democratic realities and principles.

For many influential writers of the period, then, the call for a national literature had evolved into attention to the state of one’s own mind, to those manifestations of the highest states of mind, and to the effects of literary choices on readers’ psychological states. In the history and philosophy of mesmeric consciousness, Poe, Fuller, and others discerned those principles that offered the promise of answering a central question: how does one create an aesthetic that effectively explores, accommodates, and fosters the harmonious interplay of transition states in a democratic culture?

Given its content and approach, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts should evoke interest among Poe and Fuller scholars as well as teachers, students, and historians intent upon understanding the emerging democratic sensibilities of the American Renaissance.

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Poe in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Benjamin F. Fisher

University of Iowa Press, 2010

An image of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) as a man of gloom and mystery continues to hold great popular appeal. Long recognized as one of the greats of American literature, he elicited either highly commendatory or absolutely hostile reactions from many who knew him, from others who claimed to comprehend him as person or as writer, and from still others who circulated as fact opinions intuited from his writings. Whether promoting him as angel or demon, “a man of great and original genius” or “extraordinarily wicked,” the viewpoints in this dramatic collection of primary materials provide vigorous testimony to support the contradictory images of the man and the writer that have prevailed for a century and a half.
Noted Poe scholar Benjamin Fisher includes a comprehensive introduction and a detailed chronology of Poe’s sadly short life; each entry is introduced by a short headnote that places the selection in historical and cultural context, and explanatory notes provide information about people and places. From John Allan’s letter to Secretary of War John Eaton about Poe’s West Point life to John Frankenstein’s hostile verse casting him as an alcoholic, from Rufus Griswold’s first and second posthumous vilifications to James Russell Lowell’s more sensible outline of his life and career, from scornful to commendable reviews to scathing attacks on his morals to recognition of his comic achievements, Fisher has gathered a lively array of materials that read like the most far-fetched of gothic tales.
Poe himself was creative when he supplied information to others about his life and literary career, and the speculative content of many of the portrayals presented in this collection read as if their authors had set out to be equally creative. The sixty-nine recollections gathered in Poe in His Own Time form a dramatic, real-time biographical narrative designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict with each other and sometimes in agreement but always arresting.

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