Locating Poe on New Maps

In our age of Google Maps, smartphone mapping applications, and global positioning systems (GPS), we have ready access to maps. And we expect these maps to be easily customized to our individual needs, preferences, and interests and to give us multiple perspectives and options (street view vs. satellite; best routes for walking, cycling, or driving; most direct route vs. fastest, and so on). Long gone are the days when a AAA travel agent dictated our route, marked with a highlighter, and we dared not stray from the prescribed path. Kennedy and McGann’s impressive collection of new essays on Poe, which grew out of a 2009 symposium at the University of Virginia, throws out the long-used map of antebellum literary culture, one in which a handful of male writers in the northeastern United States dominated the production and reception of literature and a marginalized Poe lacked both access and infl uence. Like the new maps made possible by recent technological innovations, the ten essays in this collection provide various maps of their landscape, the vibrantly diverse print culture of the antebellum period in which Poe was an active participant, and offer readers multiple paths to their destination, an understanding of how Poe was positioned within this culture—eschewing the notion that any of these is the map that will defi nitively reveal to us Poe’s location. The volume explicitly redraws the period-naming and canon-defi ning map provided by F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which defi ned Poe as an outsider in American literary and political thought, and builds on the numerous scholarly remappings of Poe and his culture that have appeared in recent decades, including Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting: 1834–1853 [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003]; Eliza Richards’s Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004]; Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999]; Jonathan Elmer’s Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995]; and the essays in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995]. As it does

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