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Fugitive Poe References: A Bibliography

Judy Osowski

University of Minnesota

The primary purpose of the “fugitive” Poe bibliography is to bring together recent books, essays, and miscellaneous publications (since about 1960) that do not focus on Poe but which discuss Poe within a larger perspective or with a special angle of vision. Although this bibliography also lists a few works dealing specifically with Poe that have been overlooked in other bibliographies, the entries here are principally brief items buried in longer works under different headings, or in works that were, on first publication not readily accessible. The bibliography is compiled on behalf of the Poe Studies Association Bibliography Committee appointed in 1972.

Banta, Martha. “American Apocalypses: Excrement and Ennui,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7 (1974), 1-30. [The apocalypse of Poe’s Eureka is happy because consciousness ends where it began — within itself. If the Poe characters searching for the plot of the universe were to discover God’s perfect plot, the universe would be destroyed, pp. 4-5. Other references passim.]

Bassan, Maurice. Hawthorne’s Son: The Life and Literary Career of Julian Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1970). [Poe’s influence on Gothic fiction is mentioned three times, pp. 63, 67, 126.]

Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style & Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973). [Buell mentions Eureka as a metaphysical and cosmological writing, pp. 103, 141. Other references passim.]

Christopher, J. R “On Lolita as a Mystery Story,” The Armchair Detective, 7 (1973), 29. [The allusion of the girl “in a princedom by the sea” in Lolita to Poe’s poems sets up an association between Poe and Nabakov. Moreover, the general tone of the fiction of both authors is similar, p. 29.]

Dijkstra, Bram. “The Androgyne in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature,” Comparative Literature, 26 (1974), 62-73. [Poe is an example of a nineteenth-century writer who handles with some precision the theme of the reintegration of the human soul, p. 73.]

Freeman, Ralph. “Paul Valery: Protean Critic,” in Modern French Criticism from Proust and Valery to Structuralism, ed. John K. Simon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972). [Valery is influenced by Poe’s new poetic language and concern with the psychological requirements of a poem. Poe’s requirements emphasize the process of language and the process of creation, pp. 22-23. Orher references passim.]

Havens, Daniel F. The Columbian Muse of Comedy: The Development of a Native Tradition in Early American Social Comedy, 1787-184S (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973). [Brief analysis of Poe’s review of Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion, pp. 162-163, 130.]

Holmes, Charles S. The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber (New York: Atheneum, 1972) . [Thurber’s verbal passion can be seen in his rewriting of “The Raven” from the point of view of the bird, p. 305. Other references passim.]

Hunter, Edwin R. William Faulkner: Narrative Practice and Prose Style (Washington, D.C.: Windhover Press, 1973). [The prose style of the account of the fall of Sutpen’s mansion [page 22:] in Absalom, Absalom! recalls the “rhyme of the dosing cadences of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” p. 186.]

Kashkin, Ivan. “What is Hemingway’s Style?” in Sovies Criticism of American Literature in the Sixties: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Carl R. Proffer (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Publishers, 1972), pp. 181-189. [Unlike the problems in Hemingway’s psychological sketches, the problems in many of Poe’s psychological sketches cannot be solved by close attention, but can only be solved by the author or the character he chooses to take in his confidence, p. 187]

Kerr, Howard. Mediums and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850-1900 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972). [Poe was a favorite of the American Spiritualists. For example, Lydia Tenney attempted to add “Message from the Spirit of Edgar Allan Poe” to Poe’s canon; and Sarah Helen Whitman turned to Spiritualism while mourning Poe’s death, pp. 17-20. Other references passim.]

Kuhlmann, Susan. Knave, Fool, and Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1973). [Kuhlmann mentions Poe’s “Four Beasts in One; the Homo-Cameleopard” as a probable influence on Twain’s Hvok Finn, p. 65. Other references passim.]

Marler, Robert F. “From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850’s,” American Literature, 46 (1974), 153-169. [Poe’s characters belong in tales rather than short stories because they are not realistic, p. 154. Other references passim.]

Martine, James J. Fred Lewis Pattee and American Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1973). [Pattee’s explication of “Ulalume” includes a discussion of Poe’s relationship with his nurse, Mrs. Shew, as significant to an understanding of the poem, pp. 93-94. Other references passim.]

McCormick, John. The Middle Distance: A Comparative History of American Imaginative Literature: 1919-1932 (New York: The Free Press, 1971). [Hart Crane as writer-carouser is the Edgar Allan Poe of our day, p. 136. Other references passim.]

Miller, James E., Jr., ed. Theory of Fiction: Henry James (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972). [Includes James’ comment on Poe as a good literary critic and as a man of genius, pp. 105-106, as well as his comment on the lack of “connexions” in the “would-be portentous climax of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’” p. 113. Other references passim.]

Moramarco, Fred. Edward Dahlberg (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972). [Poe, like Hawthorne and Melville is a writer of “apartness” obsessively seeking to be original pp. 62, 63. Other references passim.]

Ringe, Donald A. The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Byrant, Irving and Cooper (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1971). [The ambiguous torch light of “The Man in the Crowd” or “The Masque of the Red Death” recalls Cooper’s use of flickering torches in The Bravo and the flames of campfires in his frontier tales, p. 225. Poe’s uses of the picturesque in “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage” are examples of the special devices to be found in the American Renaissance, pp. 225-226.]

Simpson, Lewis P. “The Southern Recovery of Memory and History,” Sewanee Review, 82 (1974), 1-32. [Seventy-five years before the Southern writers of the 1920’s and ‘30’s, Poe discovered that the Southern literary mind was withdrawn from memory and from history. “The Fall of the House of Usher” symbolizes the Southern dream of the enclosed plantation mind, pp. 2-6.]

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, interviewed in The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets, ed. L. S. Dembo

and Cyrena N. Pondrum (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press 1972), pp. 61-112. [Singer says that though Poe is underrated by Americans, he is a genius who will someday be fashionable, p. 86.]

Spiller, Robert E., ed. The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters: A Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921-1963 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970). [Brooks writes in 1936 that he is living in the works of E. A. Poe and his house is the House of Usher before the fall in a world of “Ulalume,” pp. 127-128. Mumford writes in 1944 that he admires Brooks’ low estimation of Poe, p. 268.]

Sullivan, Wilson. New England Men of Letters (New York: Macmillan Co., 1972) . [The inclusion of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” helps to justify the first issue of the Pioneer, pp. 211-212. Others references passim.]

Thorburn, David and Geoffrey Hartman. Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continnities (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973). [America was a “prison-destiny” for Poe, p. 70.]

Underwood, Peter. Horror Man: The Life of Boris Karloff (London: Leslie Frewin, 1972). [The Universal Studio’s production of “The Raven” (1935), though a technical success, depended too much on Poe’s horror and not enough on Karloff’s imagination, pp. 102-103. Other references passim.]

Wade, Mason. Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (Clifton: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1973; first published in New York: Viking Press, 1940). [Poe held a low estimate of Margaret Fuller as creative artist, but he held a high, according to Poe, estimate of her as literary critic, pp. 154-155. Other references passim.]

Wagenknecht, Edward. James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). [Poe and Lowell were closer in the days of the Pioneer than the cruel lines of the Fable indicate; in the early days of their relationship they tried to work together, but Lowell concluded that, in spite of his genius, Poe lacked character, pp. 100-101. Other references passim.]

Wagner, Linda Welshimer, ed. William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism ( East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press 1973) . [The repeated phrase, “existed between them” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! may be a reference to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The implication of incest between Henry and Judith Sutpen recalls that of Roderick and Madeline Usher, pp. 31-32. Other references passim.]

Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971). [According to Weaver, Williams presents Poe’s works and their resistance to local color as he might have presented his own pp. 8, 12-13.]

Whitla, William. “Sources for Browning in Byron, Blake, and Poe,” Studies in Browning and His Circle, 2 (1974), 7-17. [Contains a comparison of Browning’s “Householder” and Poe’s “Raven,” pp. 14-16.]

Wilson, James D. “Incest and American Romantic Fiction,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7 (1974), 31-50. [Poe, unlike Goethe, Chateaubriand, and Wordsworth, sees man’s interior to be a storehouse of evil from which he must depart in order to transcend “the lure of uncontrolled solipsism.” Wilson uses “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an example of the plight of the decaying Romantic artist trapped in his consciousness, pp. 42-46.]