Throughout his distinguished career, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges maintained a complex, reciprocal literary relationship with Edgar Allan Poe. Borges referred to Poe in numerous articles, prologues, stories, poems, lectures, dialogues, and interviews he wrote or participated in between the early 1920s and the mid- 1980s. These items range from a limited number of articles and interviews focused specifically on Poe to brief nods to Poe's works in pieces dedicated to other authors. As part of a three- stage effort to offer future scholars a substantial guide to documents demonstrating Borges's long- term engagement with the US author and his works, " Jorge Luis Borges's References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 3" directs readers to the notes Borges kept in his copies of books by and about Poe that are held in his personal libraries at the Fundacion Internacional Jorge Luis Borges and at the Sala del Tesoro in the Biblioteca Nacional Argentina, both in Buenos Aires.
ABSTRACT: In chapter 3 of Brett Zimmerman’s book Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style —titled “ Allegoria , Chronographia , and Clock Architecture in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’”—he offers a diagram of Prospero’s imperial suite as shaped like a half-clock, each of the seven rooms an allegorical representation of the hours between 6 p.m. and midnight. Within those rooms walk Prospero, representing the quickly moving minute hand as it makes its way from the 11:30 p.m. position through the thirty minutes to midnight, and the Phantom of the Red Death, representing the slowly moving hour hand. David Ketterer, however, has challenged that schema as inaccurate, arguing, as well, that the architectural plan of Prospero’s suite has no discernible pattern. In this refutation of Ketterer’s refutation, Zimmerman makes some minor concessions but bolsters his original argument that the numbers the mathematics-minded Poe provides in the tale are essential clues not to be dismissed. Additionally, he provides an alternative schema addressing Ketterer’s complaint that the original diagram does not sufficiently show the “sharp turn” experienced by Prospero’s masqueraders as they go from one symbolically significant room to the next.
ABSTRACT: In “Who Wrote the Purloined Letter?” Russell Reising engages the history of Poe criticism of “The Purloined Letter.” Drawing on leads from such scholars as Daniel Hoffman, leads ignored by later critics, including nearly every essay in the well-known book The Purloined Poe , Reising situates the role of Poe’s amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin, in the context of other Poe narrators, especially those driven by a thirst for revenge following either a real or an imagined slight. This essay focuses on questions not asked by earlier critics and follows that inquiry to a detailed theory of the story’s real mystery—that is, who was it that wrote the titular letter stolen by Minister D in the first place?
Critics frequently call attention to the theme of "moral insanity" in Edgar Allan Poe's" The Tell-Tale Heart" without considering the broader implications of the narrator's "overacuteness of the senses." Rather than treating the character's acute hearing as symptomatic of mental imbalance, Kristie Schlauraff proposes that his mode of listening causes his unraveling. This article contextualizes the character's mental instability within nineteenth-century concerns regarding the predominance of rationality over emotion, a shift exemplified by the increasing authority of physicians over patients. The narrator's listening practice, Schlauraff argues, mimics a new technological and diagnostic intervention known as mediate auscultation, or stethoscopic listening, which distanced medical practitioners from their subjects by providing a way to access the intimate soundscape of their bodies and bypass narrative accounts of illness. Like a physician wielding a stethoscope, the narrator accesses two key soundscapes: the conventional sonic environment all the characters perceive, and the internal environment of the human body only the narrator discerns. His failure to navigate these competing soundscapes demonstrates the potential dangers of heightened hearing and the powerful influence of sound. As an allegory for stethoscopic listening, "The Tell-Tale Heart" offers a critique of the scientific community's growing emphasis on rationality and sensory observation to the detriment of such human characteristics as morality and empathy.
Critics have often read Poe's "The Man That Was Used Up" as a response to domestic pressures within the United States that arose due to its rapid industrial and geographic growth. Such scholarship tends to emphasize the new nation's independence from European powers, rather than attend to the ways global markets, international conflict, and the cultural memory of life "under" European colonialism continued to influence domestic decisions and politics in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In contrast, this article argues that for Poe's original readers, General Smith's prosthetics did not signify an artificial attempt to form a cohesive, new national body but instead symbolically indicated the encroachment of European colonial practices into the new and allegedly democratic nation. Contextualizing the story via the writings of Indian removal opponents, medical journals, and advertisements relating to early medical prostheses, as well as recent criticism on prosthetics, Chacon demonstrates that in "The Man That Was Used Up," it is not anxiety over the new but fear of the old that Poe portrays in his first " specifically American" tale.
ABSTRACT: This essay contributes to existing scholarly research on Poe’s relationship with photography by focusing on his metaphorical references to daguerreotypy. While Poe’s essays on this art and his personal sessions with daguerreotypists have inspired numerous articles, his tales about daguerreotypy have not been studied closely as such because they allude to it figuratively. After the daguerreian discovery in 1839, Poe’s fictional works repeatedly depicted an anxious urge in antebellum society to use the art as a rationalized magic for visually preserving the dead in a lifelike manner. His literary interests in reincarnation and the living dead manifest as portraits in a daguerreian discourse, with singular, lifelike, and even grotesquely real effects—precisely like postmortem photographs. Poe’s daguerreian technique can be seen not only in “The Oval Portrait” but also in “The Oblong Box” and “The Black Cat”—works that are representative of nineteenth-century society’s desire to prolong life or preserve the dead.
This article examines how the disease nostalgia, or home-sickness, as understood by nineteenth-century medical science, structures one of the most famous of Poe's tales and informs his aesthetic principles more generally. Through its subject and its form, "The Fall of the House of Usher" asks the reader to consider competing theories of mental illness and therapeutic treatment, in particular the "moral treatment," which relied on sympathetic conversation between doctor and patient to elicit the patient's story and engage the imagination in the process of healing. Tracking Poe's deployment of nostalgia and therapeutic narrative in " The Fall of the House of Usher" not only extends what we know about Poe's familiarity with contemporary medical discourse but also reveals his ambivalence regarding scientific attempts to diagnose, categorize, and cure the emotional and spiritual dis-ease that he understood so well and explored so compellingly in his tales.
ABSTRACT: This introduction to a multi-essay feature on Edgar Allan Poe and nineteenth-century medicine takes a biographical approach to Poe’s fascination with the practices of medicine in his lifetime and provides an overview of the variety of medical procedures, utensils, nostrums, scandals, and theories that traverse the pages of his fiction. Addressing the notoriety surrounding his alcoholism, the introduction also explores Poe’s drinking as a form of self-medicating, comprehended against the background of the deeply unjust, disordered economic system of antebellum America. The rationale for the papers included in the special feature follows from this viewpoint, showing how each covers the representation of a particular medical practice in Poe’s fiction alongside a keen understanding of the world in which he lived.
ABSTRACT: Poe is not generally seen as a health advocate, much less a proponent of a “nature cure” for human ailments. Even critics who acknowledge Poe as an environmental thinker tend to see only his role as a “dark” critic of human hubris. Yet, a closer look at such landscape sketches as “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage” alongside his apocalyptic tales, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” reveals an author both concerned with the pathogenic effects of human-driven environmental degradation and committed to curing it. Thoreau’s “tonic of wildness,” which calls for immersion in an illusory pure nature defined as distinct from the human, has dominated modern environmentalist thinking about the possibilities of a nature cure. Poe, by contrast, draws on a medical paradigm that proposed an osmotic continuum between human bodies, human-built environments, and nonhuman wilderness. Human health thus requires the shaping of a salubrious environment, and the proper tool in Poe’s view is the aesthetic sense, which acknowledges rather than elides the place of art in nature. What results are landscape sketches that shade from the clearly artful “gardenesque” into the “weird,” a heightened artificiality that not only resists the ravages of industrialism but also points toward a potential “supernal” existence. This paper thus proposes an alternative American environmental literary tradition that wends its way, not just through Emerson and Thoreau and their “wilderness cure,” but through Poe and his healing art of landscaping.
Throughout his distinguished career, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges maintained a complex, reciprocal literary relationship with Edgar Allan Poe. Borges mentioned Poe in numerous articles, prologues, stories, poems, lectures, dialogues, and interviews that he wrote or participated in between the early 1920s and the mid-1980s. These pieces range from a limited number of articles and interviews that focus specifically on Poe to brief nods to Poe's works in pieces dedicated to other authors. As part of a three-stage effort to offer future scholars a substantial guide toward the documents that demonstrate Borges's long-term engagement with Poe's works, "Jorge Luis Borges's References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 2" directs readers to over eighty coauthored and collaborative pieces (including interviews and dialogues) in which Borges references Poe providing original publication information, current bibliographic material, and annotations for each piece.
ABSTRACT: This essay argues that queer approaches to Poe’s work can benefit from a consideration of his poem “The Raven,” a work invested in finding connections between a subject’s desire and object-choice and his experience of time. The poem is especially relevant to what has been called the “temporal turn” in queer theory over the last decade: it demonstrates how non-normative desire excludes individuals from what Lee Edelman has called “reproductive futurism,” the heteronormative prescription that requires individuals to produce future generations through heterosexual pairing, and that casts individuals who do not participate in this behavior as “queer.” In the poem’s famous repetition of “nevermore,” first by the raven and then by the narrator, we can see a growing acknowledgment of the subject’s exclusion from “reproductive futurism.” And, in its conclusion, “The Raven” gestures toward the potential liberation that this exclusion offers as a temporal orientation to queer individuals—the freedom to invent new and more creative life paths as they deviate from heteronormative norms.
Drawing on historical context and queer theory, this essay examines the relationship between Valdemar and his mesmerist, investigating the risks and rewards of their experimental compact. When Valdemar consents to P's experiment, he opens himself to potential injury and certain subjugation. But he also lays claim to personhood, orchestrates his own "good death," and thwarts disgust's stigmatizing operations. Ultimately, however, Valdemar remains isolated and inscrutable, a tragic remnant of a queer and unlamented life.
