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Current Poe Activities

Organizations and Meetings

The fourteenth annual meeting of the Poe Studies Association took place at the Marriott Marquis Hotel, New York, on December 29, 1986, Glen A. Omans (Temple University) presiding. The meeting began with the election of Dennis W. Eddings (Western Oregon) to a second term as Secretary/Treasurer. Professor Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (University of Mississippi) then read a citation for David K. Jackson, PSA’s newest honorary member. Speakers on the program were: Burton R. Pollin (CUNY/ Emeritus), “The Poem as Song: Poe’s Views and Practice”; Kenneth Alan Hovey (University of Texas/San Antonio), “Poe’s Poetic Principle in Antebellum Context”; and Dana Brand (Rutgers University/ New Brunswick), “The Silent and Speaking Cities of Poe’s Poetry.” The program for the 1987 meeting in San Francisco will include: Lilliane Weissberg (Johns Hopkins University), “Poe’s Conchologist’s First Book and the Writing of the Marginalia”; Richard Kopley (Penn State University/DuBois), “The ‘Very Profound Under-current’ of Arthur Gordon Pym”; and Beth L. Lueck (University of Wisconsin/ Milwaukee), “Poe’s Landscape Fiction and the Picturesque Tour: Nature and Art in the American Wilderness.”

Dana Brand chaired the Poe Studies session at the Northeast MLA, Sheraton Boston, on April 3, 1987. Papers were presented by Tracy Ware (University of Western Ontario), “The Two Stories of ‘William Wilson’ ”; Beverly Voloshin (University of Rochester), “Transcendence Outward and Downward: Readings of ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ”; and Terry Martin (SUNY/Buffalo), “Literary Detection and the Introduction to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ ” Mary DeJong (Penn State University/Shenango Valley) will chair the 1988 Poe session at NEMLA to be held in Providence, R. I. At the 1987 Bibliography session of NEMLA, Professor Fisher delivered a paper on “Poe in Anthologies of Southern Literature.”

Jules Zanger (Southern Illinois University/Edwardsville), chaired a Poe session at the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, at Houston, Texas, on March 20, 1987. Speakers were Eric Paul Shaffer (UC/Davis), “The Persistence of Sound as a Source of the Irrational [column 2:] in Poe’s Works,” and Stuart Levine (University of Kansas), “Poe’s Eureka: Fantasy, Poetry, Science, or Put-on?” Next year’s conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and will be chaired by Nicholas Ruddick (University of Regina).

At the sixty-fourth commemorative program of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, held October 5, 1986, Bruce I. Weiner (St. Lawrence University) spoke on “The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship.” The speaker at the 1987 program will be Buford Jones (Duke University).

A conference on “Edgar Poe and Visionary Reason” was held in Nice, France, April 2-4, 1987. Among the speakers were Christina Benussi, Angela Carter, David Ketterer, Claude Richard, and Jorge Bonells. A full report on the conference may be found in the Spring, 1987 issue of the Poe Studies Association Newsletter.

Professor Fisher presented two talks of Poe interest. On January 28, 1987, he spoke on “Poe among Critics and Biographers” at the University of Southern Mississippi, and on March 10, 1987, on “Poe in The John-Donkey” at the Philological Association of Louisiana. On May 7, 14, and 21, Eliott Engel of the Dickens Club in Raleigh, North Carolina, presented a lecture series, “The Other Edgar Allan Poe.”

In October, at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, the National Park Service commemorated the 137th anniversary of Poe’s death with tours of the Poe house and free showings of the film, “A Fever Called Living.”

 

Poe-Related Research and Publications

Writings in The Broadway Journal (NonFictional Prose) comprises the third and fourth volumes of Burton R. Pollin’s Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Gordian Press). Other recent books on Poe include The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 (G. K. Hall), by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson; Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (Oxford Univ. Press), by Joan Dayan; and Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (Yale Univ. Press), by J. Gerald Kennedy. Two works have been brought out by presses in Tokyo: Shoko Itoh’s The Road to Arnheim: The World of Edgar Allan Poe (Kirihara) and Ichigoro Uchida’s E.A. Poe and the Fin-de-siecle Illustrations to His Works (Iwasaki [page 26:] Bijutsu). Forthcoming is Michael J. Williams’ A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Duke Univ. Press).

Recent collections dealing with Poe include Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (The Edgar Allan Poe Society), edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV; Edgar Allan Poe (Chelsea House), edited by Harold Bloom; Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe (G. K. Hall), edited by Eric W. Carlson; Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order (Vision), edited by A. Robert Lee; and Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (Routledge & Kegan Paul), edited by I. M. Walker.

Material on Poe may also be found in Frank Shivers, Jr., Maryland Wits and Baltimore Bards: A Literary History with Notes on Washington Writers (Maclay); The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne, by Evan Carton (The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press); Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Form (Yale Univ. Press); Burton R. Pollin’s Insights and Outlooks: Essays on Great writers (Gordian); and No Fairer Land: Studies in Southern Literature Before 1900, edited by J. Lasley Dameron and James W. Matthews (Whitston).

Noteworthy reprints of Poe works are in The Raven with The Philosophy of composition and The Black Cat, both illustrated by Alan James Robinson and published by Northeastern Univ. Press, and Last Flowers: The Romance Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman, edited by Brett Rutherford (The Poet’s Press).

Other studies of Poe interest include George Lippard/Prophet of Protest: writings of an American Radical, 1822-1854, an anthology of selections from Lippard’s work, edited by David S. Reynolds (Peter Lang), and two studies by Mary DeJong: “Her Fair Fame: The Reputation of Frances Sargent Osgood, Woman Poet,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1987; and “Lines from a Partly Published Drama: The Romance of Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe,” to be published in Patrons and Protegees: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in 19th-Century America (Rutgers University Press).

Glen A. Omans’ 1985 address to the Edgar A1lan Poe Society of Baltimore, Passion in Poe: The Development of a Critical Term, is available from that organization. [column 2:]

Pym Conference

The research conference on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, organized by Richard Kopley (Penn State University/DuBois), will be held on Nantucket Island, May 19-21, 1988. G. Richard Thompson (Purdue University) will be the keynote speaker; John Barth will be the guest of honor.

Dennis W. Eddings, Western Oregon State College