Poe, Journalist and Critic, (1969), title page and table of contents

[inside front flap:]

POE

 

Journalist and Critic

 

ROBERT D. JACOBS

 

The journalistic world of the mid-nineteenth century was often a grubby world of deadline pressures and unsympathetic employers. In this environment Edgar Poe became a veteran literary critic. Many scholars consider Poe's critical work the most significant aspect of his career. This important book will be recognized for years to come as the definitive study of Poe as a journalist and critic.

Poe was unique among nineteenth-century American critics because he not only evaluated literary works but also developed an aesthetic theory and a theory of nature to support it. Poe, as a literary critic, applied his own literary theories to the work of others.

In Poe: Journalist and Critic, Professor Robert D. Jacobs examines the operative regulations of Poe's practical criticism instead of concentrating exclusively on his aesthetic principles — a viewpoint that has been conspicuously neglected in other studies of Poe as a critic. Professor Jacobs investigates Poe's criticism chronologically to show Poe's process of maturation and his development as a critic—from his first reviews in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835 to final reviews in 1849.

The author says Poe was a polemicist who sought to enforce his doctrine through the mass media, the journals, and lecture platforms of his time. He analyzes Poe's criticism and critical theory and shows how it relates to his fiction, poetry, and the events in his life.

Professor Jacobs shows how eighteenth-century ideas, the new romanticism, and Poe's Southern origins influenced his critical ideas and political views, and gives the reader a [inside back flap:] broad philosophical rule with which to measure Poe's deviation under the pressures of the journalistic world of his time. He demonstrates that Poe, as a working critic, looked backward toward the mechanistic psychological aesthetic of the previous century and forward toward the dynamic organicism of the romantic period.

This book makes clear previously puzzling problems of Poe's apparent and real contradictions in critical theory, and introduces almost universally ignored aspects of journalism as it affected the writing of reviews and criticism of the day.

Poe: Journalist and Critic is a major scholarly contribution to the study of a significant American author.

A volume in the Southern Literary Studies series, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

ROBERT D. JACOBS is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is co-editor (with Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) of Southern Renascence and South: Modern Southern Literature in Its Cultural Setting. He has published articles in various literary journals. A native of Mississippi, he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Mississippi and his Ph.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University.