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Current Poe Activities

Organizations

The Poe Studies Association will hold its annual meeting on December 27, 1976, in the Monte Carlo Room of the Hotel Americana in New York City from I to 2: 15 P.M. during the Modern Language Association conference. In addition to business matters, the PSA program will feature three papers: “The Invisible Message: The Problem of Truth in Pym” by J. Gerald Kennedy, “On the Coincidence of the Wet Plasters in ‘The Black Cat’” by John Harmon McElroy, and “John Henry Ingram: English Architect of Poe Biography” by John C Miller. The PSA welcomes the submission, before June 1, 1977, of papers to be considered for the next annual meeting in December 1977. Papers should be sent to Professor Eric W. Carlson, PSA President, Department of English, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Ct. 06268.

James w. Gargano, Professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College, delivered the annual Edgar Allan Poe lecture, under the auspices of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and the Enoch Pratt Free Library, at the Westminister Presbyterian Church in Baltimore on October 10, 1976. Gargano’s topic was “The Masquerade Vision in Poe’s Short Stories.” Preceding the lecture, memorial wreaths were laid on Poe’s tomb, and William A. Fry, Professor of English at Prince George’s Community College, read from Poe’s poetry. Benjamin Fisher IV, Associate Professor of English at Hahnemann Medical College, will deliver the next annual lecture in this series on the topic “The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol in Poe’s Tales.”

Alexander G. Ross, President of The Edgar Allan Poe Society, announced recently that the Preservation People of Baltimore City have allocated $15,000 toward the restoration and preservation of the Poe House on Amity Street; they hope to restore the house and its interior to the way it was when Poe lived there from 1832/3 to 1835. The Society, however, lacks a description of the interior in Poe’s time and believes that none exists. If any student of Poe has pertinent information on this matter, the Society would welcome it; write Alexander G. Ross, The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, 402 E. Gittings Ave., Baltimore, Md. 21212.

Gary Hermalyn, Executive Director of the Bronx County Historical Society, announces that the rehabilitation of the Poe Cottage at Fordham has been completed. A project of the Historical Society, now the official administrator of the Cottage, the rehabilitation involved providing a new roof and completely restoring the interior (plastering, painting, and furnishing with period pieces) . The Cottage now has a live-in caretaker and a functioning staff on hand to give guided tours of Poe’s final house, open 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Saturdays and I to 5 P.M. Sundays.

Lists of slides, photographs, and shop items available from the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, have been pre pared by Denise B. Bethel, Curator. Copies of the three lists may be obtained for S2.00, the cost of duplicating and mailing, from The Edgar Allan Poe Museum, 1914-16 East Main Street, Richmond, Virginia 23223. And the Poe Foundation, Inc., sponsor of the museum, has announced that J. Maurice Duke, Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, gave a lecture on “Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend” at the Richmond Public Library, November 12, 1976.

 

Publications

The “Universidad de la Republica” [Uruguay] will publish, lecture, “Edgar Allan Poe: La Nueva Imagen,” which Stuart Levine, Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, delivered recently in Latin America. The lecture deals with the new understanding of Poe that emerges from modern scholarship.

Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV has published an essay, “To ‘The Assignation’ from ‘The Visionary’ (Part 1I)” in the fall 1975 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Librafy Chroruicle and has edited a series of scholarly studies on Poe for the spring 1976 number of the same journal. Titled “Poe the Craftsman: The Changing Fiction,” the collection contains six essays, including “Introduction: Poe and the Art of the Well Wrought Tale” and “The Power of Words in Poe’s ‘Silence’” by Professor Fisher “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book” by Alexander Hammond, “Poe’s ‘Diabolical’ Humor: [page 60:] Revisions in ‘Bon Bon’” by James W. Christie, “What William Wilson Knew: Poe’s Dramatization of an Errant Mind” by Marc Leslie Roomer, “A Telling Tale: Poe’s Revisions in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’” by Joel Kenneth Asarch, and “Poe’s Revisions of ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ — A Hoax?” by Richard Fusco. The collection is published in honor of Richard P. Benton of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and Maureen Cobb Mabbott, currently editing Volumes 11 and III of the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe for Harvard University Press, a project begun by her late husband Thomas Ollive Mabbott.

The deadline for submitting papers to the symposium on Pym that Richard P. Benton is editing for the American Transcendental Quarterly has been extended to May 1, 1977. Address contributions to him in care of the English Department, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106.

 

Work in Progress: Dissertations

John E. Piper, a master’s candidate at the University of Maryland, is writing a thesis on the history of the Poe Cottage at Fordham. Recent dissertations concerned with Poe are as follows: Neal Howard Bruss, “The Psychoanalytic Function of the Language of Literature: Freudian Theory, Modern Linguistics and the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe,’ DA, 35 (1975), 7284-A; Roland W. Nelson, “The Definitive Edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem,” D,4, 35 <1975), 4445-A; Norma J. E. Walker, “A Study of the Relation of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to the Development of His Craft as a Writer,” DA, 35 (1975), 4462-A; Allan Gardner Smith, “Nineteenth-Century Psychology in the Fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” DA, 35 (1975)’ 7880-A; James Joseph Reilly, “The Social Vision of Edgar Allan Poe: The Concepts of Human Potential and Social Interaction Presented in His Writings,” DA, 35 (1975), 7876-A; Julia Wolf Mazow, “Survival and the Guide in Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” DA, 35 (1975), G673-A; Marie-Louise N. Matthews, “Forms of Hoax in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe,” DA, 35 (1975), 6722-A. In addition, see James W. Fulcher, “The Mask Idea in Selected Fiction of Poe, Melville and Twain,” DA 36 (1976), 6082-A; Joseph Madison Kirkland, “Poe’s Universe: A Critical Study of Eureka,” DA, 37 (1976), 970-A; Kent J. Ljungquist, “Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques,” DA, 36 (1976), 6687-A; Leroy E. Perkins, “Poe at Play,” DA, 36 (1976), 6888-A; Paula W. Sunderman, “The Theme of Deception in Edgar Allan Poe’s Fiction,” DA, 36 (1976), 6105-A; and Victor J. Vitanza, “The Dialectic of Perverseness in the Major Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe,” DA, 36 (1976), 6692-A.

Two dissertations which touch on Poe are Richard Sam Di Maggio, “The Tradition of the American Gothic Novel,” DA. 37 (1976), 307-A, and Richard David Finholt, “The Murder of Moby Dick: Mad Metaphysics and Salvation Psychology in American Fiction,” DA, 36 (1976), 7420-A.

Richard P. Benton, Trinity College