Poe's Profession / Dupin's Detection

Poe's Profession / Dupin's Detection Paul C. Jones (bio) John Cullen Gruesser. Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 184 pp. $100 cloth, $70 ebook. John Gruesser, the author and editor of numerous books, largely focused on the topics of African American literature and the genre of detective fiction, has produced his first book centered exclusively on Poe with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts. In this volume, Gruesser gathers articles and book chapters written over the last decade (most of these have been published previously—in Poe Studies and the Edgar Allan Poe Review, in essay collections, and as chapters in his monograph Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction [Jefferson: McFarland, 2013]). While the book lacks a driving central argument that could serve as a satisfying and cohesive through-line for its chapters, the separate pieces collected here raise intriguing possibilities for understandings of Poe's connections to other American writers, his position in antebellum print culture, and his influence upon both his contemporaries and subsequent authors, especially those in the emerging detective genre, of which Poe has long been considered as an early practitioner, if not the actual inventor of the form. Gruesser's new book offers a solid contribution to the body of Poe scholarship—represented by studies like Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) and Terence Whalen's Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), and the essays collected in such volumes as The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995) and Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2012)—that argues that our appreciation of Poe's texts is enriched by a broader awareness of the literary and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The trio of chapters clustered together as the first part of Gruesser's book, titled "The Quixotic Quest for Literary Fame, Financial Stability, and a Republic of Letters in Antebellum America," are connected by their focus on, according to Gruesser's introduction, "Poe's unrealized ambitions as a literary artist in the 1830s and 1840s" [5], but, more broadly, they explore different ways [End Page E23] that Poe was considered an outsider by his professional peers or felt himself to be marginalized from the publishing industry, as well as from other American institutions. The second chapter of this section, "Outside Looking In: Poe and New York City" (which recently appeared also in the collection Poe and Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), is the strongest of the three as it explores through Poe's own writing his perception of this outsider status in a way that allows Gruesser to provide new insight into one of Poe's most-discussed tales, "The Cask of Amontillado." Using a selection of Poe's writings about the New York literary scene, including Doings in Gotham, The Literati of New York City, and his review of William Cullen Bryant, Gruesser explores the tensions revealed in Poe's descriptions of his contemporaries, as he sometimes "presents himself as an outsider looking in on New York" and at other times "writes about New York City for an outside, provincial audience … as a self-proclaimed insider" [22]. Much of Poe's critique of the literary establishment, of which he is a part but also feels excluded from, centers around the discrepancy between authors' popular reputations and the views of these authors held privately by editors, publishers, and fellow writers. This juxtaposition highlights the injustice of certain figures (like Longfellow) achieving popular success even while being judged as inferior or unoriginal, while others (like Hawthorne) might be well-respected by the establishment even though they do not find a large readership. Gruesser uses this context to turn to "Cask" as a reflection of Poe's resentment of these circumstances. Gruesser builds upon Joseph Schick's very convincing 1934 American Literature article that first considered "A Man Built in a Wall...

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