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Current Poe Activities

Organizations

The ninth annual meeting of the Poe Studies Association was held in the Hyatt Regency Hotel during the convention of the Modern Language Association in Houston on December 29, Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV presiding. In addition to a brief business meeting, there were papers on rhe topic “Poe and the Story of Detection and Mystery.” Participants included Bruce Weiner (St. Lawrence University), “Mystery as Metaphysics in Poe’s Tales” Dennis Eddings (Oregon College of Education), “Poe, Dupin and the Reader”; and Stanton Garner (University of Texas at Arlington), “Poe’s Dupin, From Here to Eternity.” The PSA Newsletter is published independently of Poe Studies; subscription and membership in the PSA are $4.00 yearly. Write to Thomas H. Brown, English Dept., Univ. of Mississippi, University, MS 38677.

There will be a Poe Section at the NEMLA Convention in Quebec City, April 9-11, 1981. Papers will be by John Conron (Clark University), “Poe’s Paintings”; A. William Pett (University of Rhode Island), “Poe’s Approach to Modern Art: Proto-Expressionism in the Tales”; and John Reilly (College of the Holy Cross), “Poe in Drama: Versions of the Man.”

Richard Kopley (SUNY/Buffalo) will chair a session entitled “The Fantastic in the Works of Poe” at the second annual Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, March 18-21, 1981. At last year’s inaugural conference, a session on “The Human Image in Poe” included papers by Kopley, Jules Zanger, Hal Blythe, and Charlie Sweet.

Helen Ensley (Francis Marion College) delivered a lecture, “Poe’s Metrical Techniques: The Effect of Rhyme Upon Rhythm,” at the fifty-eighth annual commemoration of the Baltimore Poe Society on October 5, 1980.

Richard Wilbur read from Poe’s poems at the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.) on October 21, 1980.

The 1980 SAMLA meeting included a paper by Lawrence Stahlberg (Virginia Polytechnic and State University), “The Antimasque and Eureka: Disunity and Unity in ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ ”

J. Lasley Dameron’s presidential address at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Tennessee Philological Association, entitled “Poe’s C. August Dupin,” has been published in the organization’s Bulletin (July 1980).

Recent Dissertations (June 1979 through December 1980)

Carol R. Arenberg, “The Double as Initiation Rite: A Study of Chamisso, Hoffman, Poe, and Dostoevsky,” DAI, 40 (1979), 834A-835A, Richard M. Glatzer, “Truth in Detail: Essays on American Detective Fiction,” DAI, 40 (1979), 850A-851A; Clifford B. Hallam, “The Double as Incomplete Self: Studies in Poe, Melville, and Conrad,” DAI, 40 (1980), 4026A-4027A; Beverly R. Voloshin, “The Lockean Tradition in the Gothic Fiction of Brown, Poe, and Melville,” DAI, 40 (1980), 4047A; Lawrence G. Dotolo, “Edgar Allan Poe s Quest for Supernal Beauty,” DAI, 40 (1980), 5054A-5055A; Phoebe J. Sokolowski, “Voices and Visions: Narrators and Their Points of View in the Short Story in France and the United States, 1830-1850,” DAI, 40 (1980), 5435A; Ronald J. Black, “The Paradoxical Structure of the Sea Quest in Dana, Poe, Cooper, London, and Hemingway,” DAI, 40 (1980), 5862A-5863A; Amy Tucker, “America’s Gothic Landscape,” DAI, 40 (1980), 5868A.

Poe and Poe-Related Research

Dennis W. Eddings (Oregon College of Education) is editing a collection of essays on Poe as a Satiric Hoaxer, and Elizabeth Wiley (Susquehanna University) is preparing a concordance to Poe’s works, keyed to the Mabbott edition.

Clarence Gohdes has prepared a sketch of Jay B. Hubbell, late scholar of Poe and Southern literature, to appear in University of Mississippi Studies in English. Richard Kopley’s essay on early illustrations of the “shrouded human figure” in Pym will be published in a book entitled The Scope of the Fantastic (Greenwood Press). And under the editorship of Marshall Tymn (Eastern Michigan University), A Guide to the Literature of [page 44:] Horror and the Ssupernatsural (R. R. Bowker) will include chapters by Jack Sullivan, Frederick S. Frank, Gary W. Crawford, and Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV.

Professor Fisher, editor of University of Mississippi Studies in English, plans a special Poe issue for 1982. Inquiries and submissions may be sent to him at the University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677. He also invites inquiries on two projected collections of essays, one entitled “Poe in His Time” on literary and biographical relationships among Poe and his contemporaries and a second on “Poe in Our Time,” dealing with Poe’s influence. On late nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures.

Frederick S. Frank will edit a Poe issue for Sphinx (University of Regina), tentatively planned for mid-1982. Inquiries may be addressed to Professor Frank at the Department of English, Allegheny College, AC Post Office Box 90, Meadville, PA 16335. Professor Frank also has forthcoming “Polarized Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography on Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Burton R. Pollin’s 1973 Baltimore Poe Society lecture is now available in a “revised and augmented edition” from Nicholas T. Smith, Bookseller/Publisher, P.O. Box 66, Bronxville NY 10708. Last year’s Baltimore lecture by J. Lasley Dameron, ‘Popular Literature: Poe’s Not-So-Forgotten Lore,” has been published in pamphlet form. Mrs. Maureen Cobb Mabbott’s tribute to her late husband, Mabbott as Poe Scholar: The Early Years, has appeared under the joint sponsorship of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the University of Baltimore, and the Baltimore Poe Society.

Poe in Fiction

Continuing the trend of mystery novels mentioned in this column last year, a spate of fictional works with Poe as a central character appeared in 1980. Bernhardt J. Hutwood’s My Savage Msuse: The Story of My Life / Edgar Allan Poe (Everest House) is a fiaional autobiography narrated by Poe. The Facts in the Case of E. A. Poe (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston), edited by Andrew Sinclair, concerns Ernest Albert Pons, instructed by his psychiatrist Charles Dupin to investigate Poe’s past in hopes of rediscovering his own identity. David Madsen’s Black Plume: The Suppressed Memoirs of Edgar Allan Poe (Simon & Schuster) involves Poe in the murder of two gypsy-like women named L’ Espan aye .

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute