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Edgar Allan Poe
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CRITICAL
THEORY
The Major Documents
Edited with an Introduction,
Notes, and Textual Variants by
STUART LEVINE AND
SUSAN F. LEVINE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLIONOIS PRESS
Urbana and Chicago
[[2009]]
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[pages v-vi, unnumbered:]
CONTENTS
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The following text appears on the dust jacket:
[[Inside front of cover:]]
Critical Theory
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THE MAJOR DOCUMENTS
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Edited with an Introduction, Notes,
and Textual Variants by Stuart Levine
and Susan F Levine
Edgar Allan Poe's reputation as an enduring and influential American literary critic rests mainly upon the pieces in this edition. Editors Stuart and Susan F. Levine provide reading texts, detailed explanatory footnotes, variant readings, and introductions to show context. They also face frankly the contradictions in Poe's critical opinions. Poe argues both that poetry is for pleasure, not truth, and that poetic inspiration leads to truth. Great works, Poe maintains, result from studied calculation, but also from irrational, supernal sources. Poe, both a biting critic and the doughty defender of American artistic achievement, was contemptuous of democratic art — except when vigorously defending it. Critical Theory highlights such conflicting ideas and suggests the reasons they are present.
What was consistent in Poe's work was not a single theory, but rather wit, playfulness, concern for the strong effect, a bin of recyclable allusions, anecdotes and quotations, and a craftsman's discipline. Poe's writing on theory is of a piece with his fiction, poetry, and journalism. The Levines explain how these critical statements also tie tightly to the social, political, economic, and technological history of the world in which Poe lived.
[[Inside rear of cover:]]
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49), preeminent American writer and literary critic, exerted a worldwide influence on literature through his short fiction and his theoretical statements on poetry and the short story.
STUART LEVINE is founding chair of the American studies department at the University of Kansas. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Edgar Poe, Seer and Craftsman, and the founder of American Studies, which he edited for thirty years.
SUSAN F. LEVINE is a former assistant dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kansas. She is the author of articles on Latin American writers. Together with Stuart Levine, she is coeditor of The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and coauthor of articles on Poe's work.
[[Outside, rear of cover:]]
Critical Theory
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THE MAJOR DOCUMENTS
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Textual Variants
by Stuart Levine and Susan F Levine
“This book provides scholars and students of nineteenth-century literary theory and Poe with a reliable edition of his essays of critical theory, heavily annotated by respected Poe scholars. The notes provide explications not easily attained elsewhere, including Poe's relationships with his contemporaries and allusions to works few of today's readers would recognize. Levine and Levine have thoroughly researched the textual variants on all of these essays and provided the most accurate texts available to date.”
— Scott Peeples, author of The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana and Chicago www.press.uillinois.edu
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Notes:
All material in this edition is protected by copyright, exclusively held by the the University of Illionis. Permission has been obtained by the Poe Society of Baltimore from the University of Illionis to provide this electronic edition for academic and research purposes only. (Permission was also obtained from the editors, personally.) The Poe Society of Baltimore asks all users of this material to respect these copyrights, and not to exceed what would typically be considered as fair use (generally interpreted as selective quotations and/or paraphrasing of only a small percentage of the total material, and with the appropriate attribution and citation).
Although Poe's writings are essentially in the public domain, the texts presented here embody often painstaking editorial work by Stuart Levine and Susan Levine, and that editorial work is protected by copyright. The introductory material, descriptions, annotations, and the apparatus of texts and variants are the editor's original work, and are even more clearly subject to copyright.
The text for this electronic version of the book was taken from an original printed form, revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination of the original edition has been included.
The table of contents is a reasonable representation of the table of contents from the original printing. Dates for the first two prospectuses have been added for the sake of the reader. In most other respects, it has followed the form of the original.
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[S:0 - SSLCT, 2009] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Editions - The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe - EAP: Critical Theory (2009)