Some Thoughts on Poe Bibliography

104 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism ford’s‘Circumstance.”’ The articleprovides,in the editor’swords, “acomparativeanalysisof the cultural significanceof the orangutang in Poe’sprototypical detective story and of animal representations in two other nineteenthcentury short stories” [ix].Achilles finds, in all three tales, that “the animal presences function as symptoms, or condensed nodes, of repressed and ambivalent cultural problems,the tabooed desire for and exploitation of people of differentsex and race, the fear of and attraction by civilizational progress, godless rationalism, disorientingurbanization,as well as the imagined securityof Christianor unorthodox belief systems” [25]. Achilles starts with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue“;the basic pattern of Poe’sstoryhas generated both “universalist ”readings-for instance,LawrenceFrank,“‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Edgar Allan Poe’s EvolutionaryReverie”[Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature 50 (1995): 168-881-and more culture-specific readings-for instance, Nancy A. Harrowitz, “Criminalityand Poe’sOrangutan: The Question of Race in Detection” [in Agonistics:Arenas o f Creative Contest, ed. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997): 177-951; and J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Psychology of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’ [American Literature 54 (1982): 165-881.Achilles demonstratesthe relevanceof both approachesby examiningthe role of beasts in Le Fanu’s“Green Tea” (1869) and in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance”(1860).The intertextualrelationships between the three stories, Achilles claims, confirm and reinforce both the universalist and the cultural-specificreadings of Poe’s prototypal detective story. “Green Tea” does for the cosmological and theological implications of “Rue Morgue”what “Circumstance” doesfor the aspects of race and gender of Poe’s story. The crisis of Enlightenment universalism in its metaphysical, epistemological, and moral aspects as emblematized in “Rue Morgue”surfaces in more explicit ways in “Green Tea,”whereas Spofford’sfrontier story “elaborateson the conflict between ethnic otherness and civilization.”Poe largely relies for this conflict on circumstantial evidence, whereas Spofford’sstory“concretizesthis conflictin a specifically American way” [231. Achilles aptly concludes : In the company of Le Fanu’s monkey and in the context of contemporary criticism such as Frank’s, Poe’s ape revealsitselfas a metaphor of Euro-American secularization in the sense of the historical deconstruction of seeminglyuniversalistmetaphysical,epistemological, and moral assumptions. In the company of Spofford’s Indian Devil and in the context of contemporary critics such as Lemay and Harrowitz, Poe’s ape appears as a metaphor of the rebellion against the oppression by ethnic and gender difference. [27] In conclusion,the book is on the whole a welcomeaddition to the bodyof Poe scholarship.One of its main interestslies in the investigationof the relation between science and literature in Poe’s work. Even though only three of the papers discuss the “talesof effect,”and the promise implied in the title is not quite fulfilled,the book stresses Poe’sartistryand bears out the claim made in the preface: “many aspects of both Poe’s aesthetic theory and practice may be regarded as reactions to the challenges of an increasingly masscultural marketplace”[ix]. Roger Forclaz Bern, Switzerland Some Thoughts on Poe Bibliography ScottPeeples. TheAjerlije ofEdgarAllanPoe. Rochester , Ny: Camden House, 2004. xii, 199.$70.00 cloth. Literary criticism has forced the bibliographer underground. What I mean is that bibliographic work, which has never been appreciated as much as it deserves, is now either totally neglected or treated with downright scorn. The only way bibliographers can practice their craft with any hope 105 of professionalrecognitionis to abandonthe enumerativefor a differentkind of bibliography,one that resembles literary criticism: discursive bibliography .Suchisthe task ScottPeeplesundertakes in TheAjblifeofEdgarAllanPoe, the publicationof which offerstheopportunitytospeakin more general terms about what discursive bibliography is and how best to write it. Peeples’swork has important predecessorsin Poe studies.Actually, Poe has been better treated by discursivebibliographers than by enumerative ones. The two book-length secondary bibliographies available,J. Lasley Dameron and Irby B. CauthenJr.3EdgarAllan Poe:A Bibliographyof Criticism , 1827-1967 [Charlottesville:Univ. Press of Mrginia]and EstherF . Hyneman’sEdgarAUanPoe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827-2973 [Boston:G.K.Hall],both pub lishedin 1974,leave much to be desired.The first is more thorough than the second, but both are poorly organized and annotated. On the other hand,Jay Hubbell’sPoe...