From the Editors

With this volume, Poe Studies reaches the half-century milestone. It is a time to celebrate what has come before, a time to look ahead, and foremost, a time to say thank you. We profoundly appreciate our broad and growing circles of community—the authors, book reviewers, audiences, editors, graduate student associates, board members, specialist readers, production staff, administrators, and many others who give life to the journal. It takes a village, indeed.

A commitment to such community—to the human in the intellectual and the intellectual in the human—has inspirited the journal since its birth. In 1968, the Poe Newsletter was founded by G. R. Thompson at Washington State University, and just three years later, under his aegis, the newsletter became Poe Studies, the first full-bodied periodical to focus on sustained critical study of the American writer. Its twofold mission: to hold itself responsible to individual scholars and the scholarly record in equal measure—that is, to collaborate with authors, at all stages of professional life, in ways at once supportive and intellectually challenging. Through it all, according to Alexander Hammond, runs a robust sense of “the importance of the craft of scholarly editing” as advocated by Thompson, who continued to serve as editor then coeditor through 1979, and by the first permanent associate editor, Kathleen McLean, the journal’s mainstay until her premature passing in 1988. In the decades since, their editorial colleagues and successors—Hammond, Jana Argersinger, Scott Peeples, and Leland Person—have guided the journal according to these ideals, carrying them forward into new critical territory.

Poe Studies has been and continues to be, at its best, a discourse community that holds difference in solution—a multi-generational project bent, not on advancing particular critical agendas, but on publishing the highest quality scholarship possible. Over the years, its editors have sponsored conference sessions on Poe in such contexts as trauma science and new single-author studies; published innovative and influential work by up-and-coming as well as established Poe scholars on topics as varied as literary nationalism, queer theory, corporate personhood, gender, game theory, and archival discovery; engaged global networks of knowledge through bibliographies and review essays; and developed leading-edge thematic features on Poe’s relationships to place and (in this volume) nineteenth-century medicine, among other subjects.

In the words of one professor of American literature: Poe Studies is a place “where new understandings grow.” In a time of immediate threat to democratic community and even to global survival, we embrace this mission anew, our small role in the largest conceivable project: defending and strengthening the often-fragile bonds among human beings and their ideas, in words that mean and matter.