Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann, is an excellent contribution to the wealth of new scholarship documenting the author's multifaceted engagements with print culture in antebellum America. Building on the stellar work of Jonathan Elmer, Teresa Goddu, Terence Whalen, Meredith McGill, and J. Gerald Kennedy, this diverse collection of essays resituates the author's oeuvre within the broader social contexts that shaped his career. Given the longstanding disagreement over Poe's views on race, a debate which peaked with the publication of Romancing the Shadow by Oxford University Press in 2001, a volume coedited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, one cannot help but read this latest collection as revisiting, albeit from a mostly oblique angle, what has remained a most vexed topic for Poe scholarship. Given the outstanding contributions to the field of American Studies that have been made by all of the scholars who have immersed themselves in the crucible of the Poe controversy, it is encouraging to think that the author would have derived some satisfaction from compelling his readers to confront America's “original sin” of racial slavery. If Poe's reputation has not emerged entirely unscathed from this affair, inasmuch as he was not immune to what Terence Whalen, in his exemplary article on the subject, has called the “average racism” of his day, we must, of course, reconcile ourselves to the facts as they remain to be found, just so long as we don't inadvertently turn the author into a monster of our own contemporary confabulation.The contributors to Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture turn the page on the Poe debate or, perhaps better, open a new chapter of it by taking a more expansive view of the author, one that encompasses his multifaceted engagements with antebellum print culture. J. Gerald Kennedy, in “Inventing the Literati,” provides a comprehensive catalog of Poe's many attempts to compile the principal members of America's republic of letters. As an author who spent much of his life shuttling back and forth across the Mason–Dixon Line, and perpetually below the poverty line, Poe was vehemently opposed to the “spirit of cliquerie” and regional provincialism that dominated the national literary scene and which largely emanated from the Boston–New York corridor. As a magazine editor and cultural critic, he encouraged a distinctively American literature that fostered homegrown talent based on originality and merit and which disdained the authority of inflated reputations, and one that furthermore remained open to foreign influence while it at the same time repudiated a servile dependence on Europe. Kennedy accords with McGill's astute assessment that even as Poe, the ever impoverished author who was dependent on his writing for his subsistence, briefly aligned himself with the robust brand of literary patriotism trumpeted by the Young Americans, this was mostly done out of his vested interest in establishing international copyright law so that “poor-devil” authors like himself would not be forced into destitution by the unfair conditions of the trade, which saw cheap editions of foreign books flood American markets. Kennedy further observes that Poe's sustained efforts to establish an American canon is a neglected feature of his life in letters, from his earliest productions on “Autography” in the Southern Literary Messenger, which he resumed in his editorial office at Graham's Magazine, and which culminated with the scandalous “Literati of New York City” that he composed for the Broadway Review. Kennedy does not neglect to mention the author's own prospectuses for projected magazines, The Penn and The Stylus, both of which failed to come to fruition, or his late lectures on “American Poetry,” which were delivered amid the anthologizing spirit of the times that witnessed a number of such compilations, including one by his nemesis, Rufus Griswold. The overall gestalt that emerges from Kennedy's article is of an author who struggled to surmount class and regional prejudices in an effort to promote a national literature that was not narrowly patriotic in tenor and tonality, and which was based on literary merit and not the cult of reputation or the censure of tradition.Leon Jackson, in “Edgar Allan Poe and the Culture of Celebrity,” picks up the stylus where Kennedy lays it down. His fascinating article documents what he calls the author's “status incongruence.” Poe, orphaned into mercantile gentry but disenfranchised by his surrogate father, was a man of genius who had to live and die by the remunerations provided by his pen and, therefore, his capacity to appeal to the tastes of the masses. He thus found himself craving the fame of less gifted individuals, while he at the same became increasingly hostile to what he perceived as the rampant hypocrisy and bourgeois elitism that honeycombed the American literary establishment. “Economically impoverished, culturally over-endowed, socially marginalized,” Jackson writes, Poe oscillated between “the poles of acquiescence and estrangement, engagement and resistance” (39). Jackson humorously—and accurately, I would add—suggests that Poe adopted what might be called a “beat and join” strategy in his repeated attempts to be admitted into the ranks of those literary elite whom he repeatedly lambasted for their lack of originality and talent. Poe's career provides a fascinating insight into antebellum celebrity culture, not only because he sought to expose the wires of the puppeteers who controlled critical opinion, but because he often resorted to the exact same practices of puffery and distortion that he disdained in others. As much as Poe abhorred the machinations of the literary market, he adroitly manipulated the strings of popular fashion in the style of the most cynical of the puppeteers he exposed. Jackson concludes his study of the author on a sobering note: “A victim of status incongruence consumed by a feeling that the respect and approval he received were less than his talent merited” (55), Poe came to believe that “deploying the technique of celebrity made him as mendacious as any of the lesser talents he criticized” (57).In “Perverting the American Renaissance,” Betsy Erkkila returns to map the unstable topography she last explored in “The Poetics of Whiteness.” Her present excursus into the labyrinthine passages of the racist imagination focuses on Matthiessen's reticence to include Poe in his much-vaunted pantheon of authors. Erkkila notes that Matthiessen overlooked Poe, who fit the critic's aesthetic mandate and temporal framework, due to the author's “anti-democratic” leanings. Against Matthiessen's politics of exclusion, Erkkila argues that Poe's renunciation of the mantra of progress and the siren song of manifest destiny was his sound rejection of the violent practices that such seductive rhetoric served to obfuscate and distort. In particular, she provides an excellent reading of “The Man That Was Used Up” as the author's incisive criticism of Andrew Jackson's and Martin Van Buren's genocidal policies of Indian removal. Her analysis reveals that Poe was well ahead of his time in anticipating contemporary historians who read the criminal legacy of the Age of Jackson as a gross failure of American democracy. She concludes by examining Matthiessen's reassessment of Poe in the article he wrote for the Literary History of the United States some seven years after American Renaissance. Matthiessen apparently wrestled with the same demons that haunt critics today as he attempted to make sense of the moral complexities of Poe's oeuvre in light of the overall shape of his career. Erkkila notes, “He appears to swing wildly between an effort to acknowledge Poe's originality, intelligence, and international fame and a perverse desire to reduce Poe's imaginative creation to a case study, a dark and maniacal reflex of his ‘psychological insecurity’” (96). In the end, Erkkila finds that the cold war romanticist had to exclude Poe because he exposed the unseemly underbelly that undermined his celebratory “Age of Emerson and Whitman.” But Matthiessen couldn't repress Poe's denunciation of the doctrine of progress for long, as two years later the critic would leap to his death in a fatal reenactment of the fateful scene pre-scripted by Poe in “The Imp of the Perverse.” Erkkila's essay is a penetrating study of the author that turns an unflinching eye on the scene of interpretation, which might also be the scene of the disaster. More affirmative than her romantic predecessor, however, she suggests that it might also be the site of redemption.Scott Peeples's essay, “‘To Reproduce a City,’” focuses on Poe's return to New York City from 1844 to 1846. The critic situates the author in the midst of the expansive growth this urban center underwent between 1830 and 1860. As a resident of what was fast becoming a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis, Poe rubbed shoulders with many of the literary elite he had so often impugned in his critical writings, and was able to witness at first hand the hectic pace of progress as Gotham was transformed into the cultural capital of the fledgling republic. Peeples concentrates most of his article on Poe's foray into the genre of “correspondences” that emerged at this time and which quickly became a popular mainstay of numerous newspapers and periodicals. Such literary correspondences typically featured observations on the social habits and personal peccadillos of cultural icons and thus anticipated what today we would call gossip columns, but also recorded more general impressions of everyday life in the city. Along with his editorial miscellanies in the Broadway Journal and his “Literati of New York City,” Poe composed a series of correspondences under the title of “Doings of Gotham.” Peeples compares Poe's effusions in this genre to the work Nathaniel Willis, Lydia Marie Child, and George Foster, who, taken as a group, represent a wide spectrum of responses to the phenomenal growth of the city. His article concludes on the suggestive note that the efforts of these writers to document their personal experiences as residents of New York City amount to more than just their textual reproductions of their own tumultuous times. Rather, the true significance of their work is that they each attempted to imagine a community that would serve as a synecdoche of the United States as it experienced rapid urbanization and unprecedented social transformation.In “Poe's 1848,” Jennifer Rae Greeson provides a fresh examination of the author's compounding of philosophical, scientific, and political language in his late cosmological treatise Eureka. She reads this text as Poe's satire of transcendental universalism and the imperialistic abuses to which such cosmopolitan doctrines might be adapted. Greeson suggests that Poe's adoption of the title of Eureka was tantamount to naming his book “California,” given that it was published just three weeks after the cessation of the Mexican–American War, and at the height of the manifest destiny “gold rush” for territorial acquisition that followed the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. More specifically, she reads Eureka as offering a regionalist criticism of the transcendentalist provincialism of the Boston “Frogpondians” who sought to impose their hegemony on the rest of the country. Just as the New Englanders refused to acknowledge the relativity of their geographical position, they self-righteously believed the world should conform to their parochial and self-aggrandizing agenda. The “Universe of Stars” recounted in Eureka accordingly amounts to Poe's twofold criticism of regional sectionalism coupled with the confluence between Transcendental universalism and American imperialism. The coincidence of “political theory and cosmology around the issues of centralization and collapse,” Greeson observes, “seems intimately related to Poe's conceptualization of his own position, as a southerner, as part of the vast peripheral expanse being organized ideologically by emanation from Boston” (132). This strategy of ideological containment, she concludes, would prove “infinitely exportable out into the globe” (137). Greeson admits that her evaluation of Poe's resistance to the canters of New England is troubled by the fact that most of the idealists were opposed to both slavery and the Mexican–American War. Moreover, whatever Poe's intentions, be they satirical or otherwise, Eureka certainly partakes of the same genre of philosophical universalism that the critic reads him as rebuking. Notwithstanding these sites for further exploration, Greeson's article places Poe's text in a productive conversation with American the of cosmopolitan in for returns to the racist of “The in the Building on the work of critics of this reads of an as the as an of Poe's on the racist of his to racial and in his of to the author, he a compelling case that Poe was racist to an in his and his article by with our contemporary our desire to the of the The of we to in our of literary he to impose an but they also serve the ideological of the our we inasmuch as we in our own and the was as as all course, it to reading literature and the all the more observes, Poe make as we at and being to the shape as we perhaps as we of we have projected the the As a the author has himself like one of those that like a and a only in Poe's his has between the genius we we and and a with an into his we make of the contexts and that the of at in our of any literary Poe and “The in the and the racial and of antebellum out that as critics we be of our own in the contribution of Poe, and the History of American with the same by is well of the of politics and but she that the should the political to which has so often been and not just in her essay reveals is that the to in of and to in the more of is new in American scholarship. Her article focuses on the between Poe's “The Journal of and the work of an for the of As a notes the that might in some be received as a of he was and a his a of in which the on Poe's that have been by for this help American of to notes that Poe, the ever the to which would him on and that would have to not only the status of his but also these in Poe's was thus his reputation as a of a and of American by to on Poe's even as he also encouraged this some moral from her “The of she writes, in the and it as is not a of that was in a of But he was she on the of literature and that we as it provided in and of a critical He thus adopted as his in to the in an effort to shape American territorial concludes that the of politics and be to such a of which be as as it is the at times to the that the we to the we to “Poe's the vast of criticism that has Poe's most popular Her article focuses on the of within “The which she argues is by the many and that were in Her is that the and not originality, is the for and international Poe's readers in and to the within their own of the is out as to “The much like to author in his on himself from the of his predecessor, a which is in the more in his of the that what in is that both an to a one based on than reading than than She of “The that Poe's and to a number of not the of the and the critical that “The on death and a of language and as well as own she observes, and a of that their in to one a which is in to our of the in antebellum article as an in the many literary contexts that Poe's of of “The by the a to the of the author's status as an man on the of the American As J. Gerald Kennedy in his to Romancing the Poe's as of to the that is a for him in the of American Literary is to the of him as a or as a to political and on his analysis of the provides of the and of what he calls “the a that Poe, and the of these authors has over the in the to below in the the of and have been on the the at as by his of has not from the of most of his admits that his inasmuch as they to between and scholars and and and I would and of the author and his But his has fascinating for to only by the where authors fit into the of American study that the by might prove a to the of and perhaps even more some in this serve as an of more within the McGann, of the the book to a with his contribution of Culture, and the and often interest in Poe that followed the of the and due to the excellent of scholarship that has to our of the author's life and He to Poe within the of antebellum and he suggests that the author in many much of the critical that followed personal life is to read and notes himself in that scene of and often social and ideological and Poe a on his That shaped him into the critic of his In the Poe became a of the of antebellum the legacy of which to shape the critical conversation the scholarship has to in to the complexities of the he such as of the Broadway he argues that a would not only to read the of Poe's but would to the of he to be Poe's and the of “The in the of be to a comprehensive of the national print scene in which Poe to The of would help to the many that shaped Poe's as by a of productions from newspapers to to and we the of reading Poe's such practices would at a more sense of the textual within which he a world like Poe, was and notes, is a for a by and of many after Poe, would to imagine it as a world that of and But the of had first to the of his of He his article and the volume to a by that “Poe's of like his for a of the of the the of and Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture a in the author's given the of and that the American a man who being it is that the should have Poe a The with the of a to Poe, and the debate was by this As has of the more in Poe is the increasingly of Poe's of the of and the out of this critical has emerged a of the author that does not so much an as it does the that Poe's readers at the of The of while it to confront the Poe with racial it as much to a of violent of the author's life and Notwithstanding the that have this the and of Poe's has served to the and work of the racial politics of antebellum print culture, and to on the for a literary criticism that is as as it is If the time has as to the politics of the with a politics for the the what Poe's legacy be as we into the of the The is to but the of the Poe has to it is that a only be by a community of scholars in to social in the present by the of the In this it is that after a of from Poe, a in to Poe's and even her into his her to ever the was able to a with Poe his we Poe's over we might all to from the in our personal and In this last Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture is a in the and, the of the I cannot think of for the If I article with a from that might have served as a to both Romancing the Shadow and Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, inasmuch as as to Poe as they to his many over the three The years much which the The who our and come and and and many and of it but an The is He many and in as with some or and is all a but the is turns out new and what he But the in our world in to our habits and to on the of a that only be by for the of for we as Emerson it so we we not be and the which be the I not what Poe, would have made of such but I like to think of in his he would have found in the

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