[page 47, continued:]

Current Poe Activities

Organizations

The eleventh annual meeting of the Poe Studies Association took place in the Petit Trianon of the New York Hilton on December 29, 1983, Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (University of Mississippi) presiding. Papers on the topic “Poe in the Classroom” include “Poe’s Symbolic Language,” Eric W. Carlson (University of Connecticut); “Poe and the Will,” April Selley (College of St. Rose); and “Subverting Interpretation: The Lesson of Poe’s Geometry in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,‘” Alexander Hammond (Washington State University). Respondent to the three papers was Joan C Dayan (Yale University). Program chairman for 1984’s PSA meeting will be David H. Hirsch (Brown University).

G. Richard Thompson (Purdue University) delivered the sixty-first Edgar Allan Poe Lecture, “Circumscribed Eden of Dreams: Dreamscapes in Poe’s Early Poetry,” at the October 2, 1983 meeting of the Baltimore Poe Society. The 1982 lecture, “The Grand and the Fair: Poe in the American Landscape” by Kent Ljungquist (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), is available at $2.90 from Alexander Rose, 402 E. Gittings Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21212. Glen A. Omans (Temple University) will be the 1984 lecturer.

The Baltimore Poe Society and the University of Baltimore sponsored a symposium, “Myths and Reality: The Mysterious Mr. Poe,” October 21-23, 1983. Made possible by the Maryland Humanities Council, the program included lectures by John Ward Ostrom (Emeritus, Wittenberg University), “Edgar Allan Poe: Finances, Drugs, and Alcohol”; Fisher, “Poe at Work: Poe’s Methods as a Literary Artist”; Cliff Krainik (Washington, D.C.), “The Sir Moses Ezekiel Statue of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore”; Richard P. Benton (Trinity College), “The Women in Poe’s Life”; and William T. Bandy (Emeritus, Vanderbilt University), “Poe’s Last Days and Death.” Related panel discussions included the leaurers and the following participants: Stephen Matanle (University of Baltimore), Lawrence W. Markert (University of Baltimore), Richard Hart (Vice President, Poe Society), Adelio Macentelli (Essex Community College), and Alexander Rose (Secretary, Poe Society).

Louis Renza (Dartmouth College) delivered a paper, “The Secret Autobiography of Edgar Allan Poe,” at the 1983 English Institute, Harvard University, September, 1983.

Donald Barlow Stauffer (SUNY at Albany) chaired a session on the topic “Poe and City” at the 1983 meeting of the Northeast MLA, Philadelphia, March 29-31. Papers include Linda Patterson Miller (Pennsylvania State University, Berks), “Poe on the Beat: Doings of Gotham as Urban Journalism”; Dana Brand (Rutgers University), “From the ‘Flaneur’ to the Detective: Interpreting the City of Poe”; William Goldhurst (University of Florida),

“American Concepts of the City in Poe’s Detective Tales.” Chairman of next year’s session will be Richard Kopley (Pennsylvania State University, Dubois).

Recent Dissertations: January 1982-June 1983

Richard A. Kopley, ” ‘No Tie More Strong’: Brotherhood and Beyond in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” DAI, 43 (November 1982), 1545A and Joan Tyler Mead, “An Impudent and Ingenious Fiction’: Creative Process as Theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” DAI, 43 (June 1983), 3909A3910A. Dissertations which touch on Poe include Catherine Boulton Hughes, “The Detective Form: A Study of Its Sources in Late Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction and Works of James and Conrad,” DAI, 42 (March 1982), 4006A-4007A; John K. Limon, “Imagining Science: The Influence and Metamorphosis of Science in Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” DAI, 42 (June 1982), 5122A-5123A; Margaret E. Powers, “‘The Unstrung Balloon’: A Study of Narrative Devices in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” DAI, 41 (June 1982), 5123A; Anne French Dalke, “‘Had I Known Her to Be My Sister, My Love Would Have Been More Regular’: Incest in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” DAI, 43 (September 1982), 801A; and Yusur Wajeeh Al-Madani, “Errand to the Center: The Archetypal Journey Image in Thoreau, Poe, and Melville,” DAI, 43 (June 1983), 3909A-3910A.

Poe-Related Research and Publications

J. Lasley Dameron (Memphis State University) continues his research on the nineteenth-century magazine milieu and Poe’s interest in popular culture. Joan C. Dayan is working on a book-length study with Eureka as the primary focus. John T. Irwin (Johns Hopkins University), whose American Hieroglyphics is now available in paperback (Johns Hopkins), is working on a book-length study of Poe and Borges. Cliff Krainik, whose field is historical photography, is at work on an iconography of Poe. And Glen A. Omans is writing on an essay on Poe and the American painter Washington Allston.

Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser (University of California, Riverside), Eric Rabkin (University of Michigan), and Robert Scholes (Brown University), contains useful discussions of Poe’s affinities with fantasy writers. Poe and Our Times, edited by B. F. Fisher, will contain essays by Maurice Bennett (University of Maryland), Bruce Weiner (St. Lawrence University), John E. Reilly (Holy Cross College), Laura Menides (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Eleanor Dwight (New York University), and Ljungquist. A forthcoming issue of The Sphinx, edited by Frederick S. Frank (Allegheny College), will contain essays on Poe by Edward W. Pitcher (University of Alberta), Richard Kopley (Pennsylvania State University, DuBois), and Ljungquist. Viaor Strandberg (Duke University) devotes a section to Poe’s characters — “sick souls, rent by inner discord“ — in his Religious Psychology in American Literature: The Relevance of William James (Totowa, MD: Studia Humanitatis, 1981).

Kent Ljungquist will do the 1983 survey of Poe criticism for American Literary Scholarship (Duke University Press). Send reprints to Humanities Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609. “The Annual Bibliography of Gothic Studies” will be published in chapbook form by Gothic Press under the direction of Gary Crawford and Steve Eng.

Roscoe Brown Fisher has edited The James Carling Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (Statffville, N.C.: Fisher Publications, 1982), containing thirty Raven sketches by Carling and essays by George F. Scheer, the late T. O. Mabbott, Raymond W. Adams (Emeritus, University of North Carolina), and Floyd Stovall (Emeritus, University of Virginia). Burton R. Pollin (Emeritus, CUNY) providff a review of this volume in the Poe Studies Association Newsletter, 11 (Fall 1983), 2. Southern Classics Library has reprinted Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Birmingham, Alabama: Oxmoor House, Inc., 1982), illustrated by Harry Clarke. Accompanying this deluxe edition is a booklet by Pollin, also entitled “Tales of Mystery and Imagination — Edgar Allan Poe,” discussing Poe’s illustrator, F. O. C. Darley.

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute