Poe Society Publications

Publication ... : 2007-1   $4.50  (40 pages)
Author .......... : Sara E. Selby
Title .............. : The Musical Poe

Excerpt: “The interrelatedness of poetry and music has been the subject of a considerable amount of serious academic exploration . . . To discuss the impact of music on Poe’s works, one must gain some understanding of the musical milieu in which those works were produced . . . [Poe] was passionate about both music and poetry, and he was keenly aware that lyricists generally earned more for their pieces than mere poets. I would argue, therefore, that to reject the idea of Poe as a lyricist is to continue the unfortunate tradition of belittling popular music. . . .”

Publication ... : 2007-2   $4.50  (28 pages)
Author .......... : Miraim J. Shillingsburg
Title .............. : The Apocalyptic Vision of “The Masque of the Red Death”

Excerpt: “. . . I believe . . . that the story is genuinely apocalyptic in its vision, not only in the generalized theme . . . but also in the imagery and allusions predictive of the destruction that would befall Poe’s adopted homeland in less than two decades after the first publication of this story in Graham’s Magazine for May 1842. . . . Perhaps the best help in comprehending the self-consciously apocalyptic theme of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ . . . is stated by the influential twentieth-century social anthropologist Victor Turner. . . .”

Publication ... : 2007-3   $4.50  (32 pages)
Author .......... : Kevin J. Hayes
Title .............. : Poe’s “Spectacles” and the Camera Lens

Excerpt: “. . . The reception history of ‘The Spectacles’ has followed a general trajectory from appreciation to neglect. . . . As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, readers unfamiliar with earlier stage conventions began to take ‘The Spectacles’ at its most literal level. . . . On the other hand, Poe’s tale has not been completely without admirers. . . . Though the story makes no direct mention of the photographic camera, spectacles have often been associated with a variety of objects useful for seeing or improving sight. . . . The prescience Poe reveals in ‘The Spectacles’ is extraordinary. Poe was one of the first to recognize that the camera lens created a new relationship between audience and performer and that it changed both the nature of performance and the way performances are perceived. . . .”  

Publication ... : 2002-1   $4.50   ISBN 0-9616449-8-2   (34 pages)
Author .......... : J. Gerald Kennedy
Title .............. : The American Turn of Edgar Allan Poe

Excerpt: “As a writer of tales, Poe displayed scant interest in the Puritan past, the settlement of the colonies, the Revolution, pioneer life, or our national heroes. . . . And yet . . . Poe was sometimes most American when he was imagining Europe, delineating Old World scenes and circumstances. . . . Although Poe in his early career resisted and indeed ridiculed the call for a national literature, he was not altogether impervious to its pressure. . . . As he dodged American history, derided the preference for ‘American Themes,’ and ducked the work of imagining a nation, Poe nevertheless persevered in Americanizing the Gothic. . . .”

Publication ... : 2001-1   $4.50   ISBN 0-9616449-7-4   (24 pages)
Author .......... : Thomas Bonner, Jr.
Title .............. : The Epistolary Poe

Excerpt: “Letter writing in the Nineteenth Century was the only coherent and discursive individual means of communication over long distances. . . . In the hands of certain practitioners, letter writing truly became an art form — and Edgar Allan Poe became a master of this art. . . . [The] lines between Poe’s letters and his other writing frequently intersect, as language and forms from one genre enter another in the poetry and the fiction and the criticism. . . .”

Publication ... : 2000-1   $4.50   ISBN 0-9616449-6-6   (36 pages)
Author .......... : Michael L. Burduck
Title .............. : Usher’s “Forgotten Church”?: Edgar Allan Poe and Nineteeth-Century American Catholicism

Excerpt: “. . . the prominence of the Church in America, especially during the 1830s and 1840s, important contacts he counted among his friends, and some of the suggestions appearing in a number of his works, lead me to posit that Poe evinced more than a mere passing interest in Roman Catholicism. . . .”

Publication ... : 1998-1   $4.50   ISBN 0-9616449-5-8   (26 pages)
Author .......... : David H. Hirsch
Title .............. : Poe as Moralist: “The Cask of Amontillado” and the Transvaluation of Values

Excerpt: “It is odd that students of Poe should be so quick to cut off his psychology from his ethics. . . . Perhaps it is because Poe’s characters sometimes seem to feel no guilt for crimes they have surely committed, or actually deny feeling guilt for their crimes, that we mistakenly refuse to give Poe credit for raising moral issues in his fiction. . . .”

Publication ... : 1995-1   $4.50   ISBN 0-9616449-3-1   (29 pages)
Author .......... : Craig Werner
Title .............. : Gold Bugs and the Powers of Blackness: Re-reading Poe

Excerpt: “My primary concern . . . is to supplement the substantial body of what would traditionally be described as Poe’s influence, with an emphasis on the work of two major emerging novelists, Leon Forrest and Richard Powers. . . . I shall also investigate how a variety of relatively recent re-readings of Poe contribute to freeing hidden potentials in his work . . .”

Publication ... : 1994-1   $3.95   ISBN 0-910556-30-X   (19 pages)
Author .......... : Dennis W. Eddings
Title .............. : Poe’s Tell-Tale Clocks

Excerpt: “Poe uses clocks and clock imagery to delineate and judge his characters’ attitudes toward life and its possibilities, their treatment of the clock being what tells the tale. . . . Integration of self through the merging of imagination and reason is, for Poe, the only means by which we can hope to deal with an inherently duplicitous and unpredictable world. . . . Poe’s clocks are one means by which he reveals and develops these possibilities . . .”

Publication ... : 1993-1   $3.95   ISBN 0-910556-29-6   (24 pages)
Author .......... : Richard Fusco
Title .............. : Fin de millenaire: Poe’s Legacy for the Detective Story

Excerpt: “When exploring Poe’s place as the father of the modern detective story . . . today’s readers have dissected the Dupin stories . . . . I submit, however, that reading ‘The Gold-Bug’ is vital in understanding Poe’s notions about ratiocination. . . . All of the recluses I have discussed here, from Legrand to [Phillip] Marlowe, have entertained the inevitability of the apocalypse, but they have also sought ways to salvage for themselves whatever amusement they can find . . . Poe may have indeed succeeded in defining one candidate for the quintessential twentieth-century man . . .”

Publication ... : 1992-1   $3.95   ISBN 0-910556-28-8   (28 pages)
Author .......... : Richard Kopley
Title .............. : Edgar Allan Poe and The “Philadelphia Saturday News”

Excerpt: “A careful reading of the two-and-one-half-year run of the Saturday News reveals both new evidence regarding Poe’s contemporary reputation and hitherto unexamined news stories which Poe transformed for his stories — most crucially and extensively, for the first of his detective stories ‘the first modern detective story’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘. . . . ”

Publication ... : 1987-1   $3.95   ISBN 0-910556-27-X   (23 pages)
Author .......... : Bruce I. Weiner
Title .............. : The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship

Excerpt: “Poe . . . cherished all that the poet values, but his literary life was dominated by editorial drudgery, low pay, lack of appreciation, and vicious literary warfare. . . . The influence of the marketplace is evident in Poe’s association of the man of letters, and ‘the poet in especial,’ with ‘poor devil authors.’ Long before 1849 poverty had become for Poe a condition of authorship. . . . The failure of Poe’s first three books of poetry forced him to tailor his aspirations to the more commercial world of magazine publishing . . . Impoverished, Poe often wrote expressly to make money. Yet he was ambivalent about the kind of writing he had to do in order to make a living. . . .”

Publication ... : 1986-1   $2.95   ISBN 0-910556-22-9   (30 pages)
Author .......... : Glen Allan Omans
Title .............. : “Passion” in Poe: The Development of a Critical Term

Excerpt: “Between 1836 and 1848 . . . Poe made seven major critical statements against the expression of passion, or strong emotion, in poetry. . . . During the last five years of his life, Poe made his ban on passion one of the standing points of his aesthetic theory. . . . German Idealist aesthetic thought from Kant through Schiller not only eloquently clarifies Poe’s position on the conflict between passion and the pure aesthetic affect, but also offers a tradition, a lineage, a support group within which Poe could more firmly stand against the otherwise alien and overwhelming tradition of British Empirical aesthetics. . . .”

Publication ... : 1986-2   $3.95   ISBN 0-910556-24-5   (41 pages)
Author .......... : Alexander G. Rose III & Jeffrey A. Savoye
Title .............. : Such Friends as These: Poe’s List of Subscribers and Contributors to His Dream Magazine

Excerpt: “Among the unpublished items in the Amelia F. Poe collection is a notebook . . . A Pratt Library note . . . identifies the notebook as follows: ‘Contains a list of names, mostly friends and acquaintances, whom Poe hoped to secure as subscribers to his projected magazine, The Stylus.’ . . . [This] publication might well be subtitled, ’some materials toward an analysis of Poe’s relation to the persons listed in his MEMORANDA book.’ . . .”

Publication ... : 1982-1   $2.90   ISBN 0-910566-18-0   (24 pages)
Author .......... : Donald Barlow Stauffer
Title .............. : The Merry Mood: Poe’s Uses of Humor

Excerpt: “In his own lifetime Poe’s readers did not think of him as a humorist, and this opinion prevailed for at least seventy-five years. . . . But many serious readers of Poe have taken his humor seriously, dating back to Professor Thomas O. Mabbott, who in 1928 wrote a pioneering article about Poe’s humorous tales. . . . Poe will not replace Mark Twain in the nineteenth century or S. J. Perelman in the twentieth as America’s great humorist. But our sympathetic rereading of his work in the past decade or two has revealed a much more versatile and many-sided writer than the tortured gothicist of yore. . . .”

Publication ... : 1982-2   $2.90   ISBN 0-910556-20-2   (17 pages)
Author .......... : Kent P. Ljungquist
Title .............. : The Grand Fair: Poe in the American Landscape

Excerpt: “Ever since the poet William Carlos Williams dubbed Edgar Allan Poe the spontaneous outgrowth of his local American milieu, critics and scholars have overlooked or ignored Williams’ worthwhile suggestion to place Poe on native grounds. . . . In the background of the failure of Julius Rodman lies an entire array of rich aesthetic assumptions about landscape that go back several centuries before Poe. . . . Poe’s participation in the mainstream of American landscape literature is marked, if anything, by his refusal to ape the details of native scenery. . . . Rather, Poe emphasized method and execution; the sublime and the beautiful became primary tools in describing the grand and fair in nature or elsewhere. . . .”

Publication ... : 1981-1   $2.50   ISBN 0-910556-17-2   (18 pages)
Author .......... : Helen Ensley
Title .............. : Poe’s Rhymes

Excerpt: “In recent years it has been the fashion, more often than not, to consider Poe’s poetry so much journalistic hackwork . . . straining for effect. . . What critics have not noticed, however, is that in his penchant for approximate and light rhymes, Poe shared the taste of some eminently successful modern poets. He was, perhaps, not so much careless as simply ahead of his time. . . . Thus it is clear that Poe’s handling of sound is far more complex than has generally been recognized. . . .”

Publication ... : 1980-2   $2.50   ISBN 0-910556-16-4   (14 pages)
Author .......... : J. Lasley Dameron
Title .............. : Popular Literature: Poe’s Not-so-soon Forgotten Lore

Excerpt: “Examining some of Poe’s stories and their analogues which Poe encountered in his reading of popular serials suggests his efforts to blend the sensational theme with the dictates of a traditional classical taste. . . . study of the popular periodical literature of Poe’s day is, I am convinced, essential and necessary if we are to understand Poe’s contribution to short fiction. . . .”

Publication ... : 1977-1   $2.50   ISBN 0-910556-77-1 **   (14 pages)
Author .......... : James. W. Gargano
Title .............. : The Masquerade Vision in Poe’s Short Stories

Excerpt: “. . . of all American writers, Edgar Allan Poe makes the most insistent and compelling use of the masquerade to convey a complex view of life. . . . death is paradoxically a scourge and a consummation, and life is simultaneously a harrowing reality and a delusive dream. . . .”

Publication ... : 1976-1   $2.75   ISBN 0-910556-76-1 **   (33 pages)
Author .......... : John E. Reilly
Title .............. : The Image of Poe in American Poetry

Excerpt: “The evolution of Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation is a remarkable chapter in the annals of American literary history. . . . Poe was the subject of at least three dozen poems or passages in poems written during his lifetime. Much of this verse is of special interest because it is the work of men and women who knew him personally and thereby represents the immediate impact of the man himself. . . . What threatens to be overlooked in our present pondering upon the real Poe is that the legendary Poe, the one celebrated in that vast body of poetry devoted to it, is also an historical fact. It is, moreover, a cultural phenomenon and an aesthetic accomplishment.”