This article expands the critical field of Poe studies by situating his work within a world literary framework attentive to the symbolic displacement of global Blackness. Drawing on the concept of the "poethical"-the intersection of poetics and ethical imagination, developed here through the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Black radical thought-the essay argues that Poe's fiction is haunted by two key forces of the counter-sublime: the spectral figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the figure of the insurgent Black feminine. These figures disrupt Poe's textual landscape, provoking deep anxieties about Black resistance, revolutionary rupture, and the limits of white epistemology. While the theoretical lens of the poethical is relatively new and will be fully elaborated over the course of the analysis, the essay grounds its intervention in sustained close readings, illuminating how Poe's racial imaginaries operate not merely as reflections of white antebellum fear, but as elements of a larger poethical field that reshapes the ethical and political stakes of nineteenth-century literary modernity.
During the early 1840s, Poe established several new forms of short fiction, including the detective story, the locked-room mystery, and a peculiar kind of horror tale, whose protagonist is either obsessed with capturing visual images or haunted by their uncanny reproduction. With "The Gold-Bug," Poe recombined elements of those genres even as he invented two more: the cryptographic mystery and the tale of finding buried treasure. All of these innovations were partly inspired by Louis Daguerre's recent discovery of a chemical process that not only recorded reflections appearing in a camera obscura but also engraved them, as if by magic, on metal plates, thus making photography possible. In "The Gold-Bug," at every level of the text, Poe elaborated on the idea of disclosing previously hidden, invisible, unseen sights. He also made Legrand's similar discovery-a method for developing latent images through a chemical reaction-nearly inseparable from the fantastic stories that could be told about it. Poe's famous tale of pirate treasure thus demonstrates his familiarity with an important development in nineteenth-century science, his use of this knowledge to devise new literary forms, and his awareness of the connection between scientific progress and popular storytelling about inventions and discoveries. Later, in "Von Kempelen and His Discovery," "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade," and other satires, Poe showed even more clearly how advances in technology lead to narrative invention.
Thanks to generations of women scholars, readers of Poe scholarship today have a far richer and more nuanced understanding of the writer's connections to literary women of his day; of his conscious and unconscious attitudes toward women's autonomy and self-determination through writing; and of the complex tides of influence between Poe and the prominent literary women to whom he was closest. But many of those women scholars have still to get their due. Building on the pioneering work of Eliza Richards and Colin Dayan, this article offers a survey of those prominent women who, during Poe's lifetime and in the generation or so following, had the most far-reaching impact on his writing, literary networks, and reception. I begin with influential editor and early Poe advocate Sarah Josepha Hale before discussing the women who after Poe's death made the most headway in establishing an accurate, nuanced, anti-Griswoldian account of the writer's life. Finally, I enumerate the many women, far more than have been previously acknowledged, who contributed to Poe scholarship between the dawn of the twentieth century (which sees the end of direct reminiscences of Poe's life) and 1968, the year Amy Branam Armiento points to as the beginning of the modern era in women's Poe scholarship.
This article explores the little-known and brief correspondence between Edgar Allan Poe and Lydia Sigourney, positing it as a precursor to Poe's later, more full-blown engagement with and critique of women's poetry. Here we can see Poe's early thinking about the role that popularity and imitation should and should not play in the composition and reception of poetry and how these preoccupations are primarily tied to issues of gender. Sigourney's various reactions to Poe's engagement with her reveal her trying out public, private, and creative responses to deeply-gendered critiques. This article argues that this correspondence serves as a testing ground for the active and continual construction of Sigourney's legacy, which she will go on to craft over the long career that follows.
In this article, I read Poe's "The Oval Portrait" through Eliza Richards's emphasis on Poe's replications of feminine poetic voice as well as through some of the dominant templates for queer readings of Poe, including homoerotic mimicry and a resistance to reproductive futurism. In reading the story through both gender and sexuality, I consider Poe's cross-gendered imitation as not just heterosexually erotic, as many of Poe's imitations of poetess voice clearly were, but also erotically queer, questioning the line between genders and Poe's self-proclaimed role as aesthetic producer of feminine death. This cross-gendered Poe opens up a new way of reading the author's imitations, including his textual imitations of visual artworks, his aesthetic imitations of other writers, and the internal imitations between a story's characters. I propose reading these forms of mimicry through ekphrastic imitation, which theorists have framed as always necessarily about gender (and gender anxiety or instability). Through Richards, I argue, we might imagine a Poe who is not just an author of gay panic but a conscious performer of a femme persona.
I focus on the deployment of scientific discourses in Poe's "Hans Phaall-A Tale" (1835) and Richard Adams Locke's "Moon Hoax" (1835) in a shared racial project. I draw on Charles W. Mills's theory of the "Racial Contract," which posits that the historical invention of the "state of nature"-outside and opposed to the social contract of the civil state-created new categories of space and persons to be colonized. I argue that in Poe's and Locke's texts, the moon functions as such a space: conquered visually and epistemologically by science, it is also the home of unmistakably racialized lunar bodies. Figured as monstrous hybrids, the lunarians embody the texts' fears about racial mixing. Yet the tales offer different responses to these anxieties. Locke's fictionalized Sir John Herschel acts as an agent of the imperializing state, overseeing a lunar Eden of racial harmony, while Poe's Hans Phaall is a settler-outlaw whose identity threatens to merge with the native, hybridized lunarian. Contextualizing "Hans Phaall" within contemporaneous debates in racial science, I show that Hans and his lunarian conjure the specter of racial "degeneracy," casting doubt in the text on the social contract and its promise of human freedom.
This essay explores the far-reaching influence on antebellum American literature of the January 1845 publication of Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the first fully articulated exposition of evolutionary theory to appear in English. In Explanations, , published in New York in 1846, Chambers replied forcefully to his scientific and theological critics and then correctly claimed that his work represented nothing less than a complete conceptual revolution, not only in science but in our understanding of the nature and purpose of existence itself. Focusing on Poe, Whitman, and Thoreau, this essay argues that Vestiges provided not only essential subject matter for these writers, but also provoked each to develop a productive set of heuristics, or open-ended methods of problem-solving. The revolutionary moment sparked by Vestiges led each to engage in a rethinking of the nature and purpose of literature and to develop stylistic innovations that came to change the direction of American literature itself.
This essay examines the connections between Edgar Allan Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" and the scientific and political discourse of antebellum America, particularly insofar as it centered on atmospheric science. This essay argues that Poe's story should be read within an antebellum comprehension of atmospheric science that used the atmosphere as a metaphor to comment on freedom, revolution, and slavery. I read Hans's journey through the atmosphere as a thought experiment addressing the contemporary scientific challenge of measuring the upper atmosphere, while also engaging with the era's scientific literature, notably the work of the French astronomer Benjamin Valz. Furthermore, the essay examines the story's engagement with racial determinism and its commentary on human liberty. I suggest that Hans's interaction with the atmosphere both figuratively and literally reflects upon contemporaneous ruminations about race and bondage. By placing "Hans Pfaall" amidst the scientific discourse on atmospheric and astronomical sciences and examining its political and intellectual underpinnings, the essay contributes to the understanding of Poe's work within the broader context of nineteenth-century science and its metaphorical use in literature to address questions of human liberty and knowledge.
