Text: G. R. Thompson, “Preface to the Online Edition,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. na (This material is protected by copyright)

 

Preface to the Online Edition

IT IS MOST GRATIFYING to find that an academic book out of print for forty years is considered worthy of on-line republication. Largely thanks to a pivotal review by Richard P. Benton of Trinity College, the book gradually became central (for a while) for a re-conception of Poe's narrative art. I had sought to modify what I thought were the imprecisions of literary histories and psychoanalytic critical biography by attempting to place Poe more accurately in his transnational literary-aesthetic milieu. I have defined this milieu at different times in terms of various forms of “alternative romanticism” — including concepts and terms like dark romanticism, negative romanticism, gothic, grotesque, arabesque, Rahmenerzählungen [framed-tale cycles], self-reflexive parody, romantic irony, and dialogism. These are the essential literary subjects of Poe's Fiction, though I also tried to frame aesthetic analysis within an interpretation of Poe's overall career. Poe scholarship and criticism has moved on, but I still read Poe's narratives essentially the way that I did then — for I think romantic irony is, in fact, the key to what Poe called “book unity” in his corpus of work.

A year after the book's original publication, Howard Kerr of University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, at my request, offered a list of misprints and errata that he had found. These included transposed words and missing or incorrectly added punctuation in quoted material. I am most grateful to him for these corrections, but I confess I felt chagrin at their number — for I had hired a student to check quotations and read proofs aloud with me every day over the course of a week. (One or both of us must have fallen asleep from time to time.) Most of these emendations have been incorporated in this text; Jeffrey A. Savoye has indicated these in the present on-line reprint edition so as to preserve the original book as an “artifact” of the era in which it was published.

Professor Kerr also recommended that in any future edition I reference more thoroughly passages generally paraphrased or quoted from secondary scholarship. These sources had been specified in the main text by work and author (followed by parenthetical page references) and in the notes. My working principle had been to indicate at the beginning of a paragraph such sources and assume the reader would understand that the rest of the paragraph (or series of sentences) was governed by the source identification. I did not think that a plethora of parenthetical page references in the main text was necessary (nor now, especially in an artifact). Although I tried to locate Poe more centrally than before in the tradition of German romanticism I made no claim to be fluent in German at that time and pointed out that much of my presentation was based on translations and derived from previous scholarship (Preface, pp. xii-xiii). In a later monograph on Poe, I made greater use of German eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts in German while also relying on translations — especially, whenever obtainable, nineteenth-century English translations available to Poe — and of course citing pertinent scholarship. See Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism: The Example of Poe's “Narrative,” published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 35 (1989), pp. 159-271. These two works may be read together as one extended argument.

For their support for this republication of Poe's Fiction, I want to thank among others: Robert Paul Lamb of Purdue University; Grace Farrell, formerly of Butler University; Philip Haldeman, owner and publisher of English Hill Press; Barbara Cantalupo, editor of the Edgar Allan Poe Review; Jana L. Argersinger, longtime editor of Poe Studies. I am especially grateful to Jeffrey Savoye, who initiated the project for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. His editing and cross-referencing with other texts made what could have been a time-consuming and problematic project for the author a pleasure.

G. R. T.

Lafayette, Indiana

June 8, 2018