Poe in the Marketplace: Making Sense of Reprinting

R E V I E W Poe in the Marketplace: Making Sense of Reprinting Jonathan H. Hartmann. The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe. In Studies in American Popular History and Culture, ed. Jerome Nadelhaft. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2008. vii, 134 pp. $125.00 cloth. T his review involves a recent but relatively unnoticed contribution to the scholarship on Poe’s writing relative to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace: Jonathan Hartmann’s 2008 The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe. The ongoing evolution of such scholarship can be seen in Les Harrison’s proposed panel titled “Remixing the American Renaissance” for the 2012 conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, a panel focused on “works written during the middle decades of the nineteenth century . . . at the dawn of the first information revolution in the United States—not just print, but cheap, abundant print, as well as the rise of visual and mass culture.” Harrison, who studies Poe and information technologies, is concerned with works that “made conscious use of the strategies which would come to be defined as remix culture (sampling, reappropriation, mixing of genres , repackaging).” Their “natural state” is one of “adaptation, fluid textuality, reprinting, reappropriation, distortion,” a viewpoint attributed to such scholars as John Bryant in The Fluid Text (2002) and, most significantly for this review, Meredith McGill in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834– 1853 [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; see Harrison, posted e-mail to H-Amstdy, 22 August 2011, http://www.h-net.org/∼amstdy/]. McGill’s convincing revisionist view of the literary marketplace in Poe’s era as a “culture of reprinting” forms a key foundation for Hartmann’s The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe, which tries to tease out how Poe as a professional author strategically shaped his writing for “a culture marked by widespread reprinting of periodical and book-length texts” [2]. Indeed, one might find the seeds for Hartmann’s approach in the focuses that McGill outlines for her fourth chapter, “Unauthorized Poe” [cf. 149–51]. While Hartmann does not directly address the “fluidity” of Poe’s oft-reprinted texts as does McGill, Harrison’s proposed panel on “remixture” could extend its concerns to the online marketing of such monographs as Hartmann’s, which is itself a kind of adaptation and recirculation of the marketplace scholarship that informs it. Indeed, Google searches for The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe will generate a C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 115 R E V I E W ten-page “preview” in Google books as well as repeated “remixed” descriptions of the monograph as they circulate on the commercial Web sites that offer it for sale. Typical of these descriptions is the following (I quote from Barnes and Noble’s online site): “The circulation and marketing of Edgar Allan Poe’s prose are explored in this book through close readings of Poe’s fictive, journalistic , and critical writings, and an examination of his involvement in the transatlantic literary marketplace and his development of a literary brand” [http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ (accessed 15 July 2011)]. The emphasis on circulation and “the transatlantic literary marketplace” obviously signals that this is a post-McGill study to readers of Poe criticism. And distasteful as the jargon in “development of a literary brand” might be to those readers, Poe occasionally did think in such terms. Thus in “Letter to B——” (1831, 1836), a young Poe considers the “great barrier in the path of an American writer” to be authors with well-known names and reputations in the literary marketplace: “for it is with literature as with law or empire—an established name is an estate in tenure” [ER, 5–6; in chap. 3, Hartmann notices this image (37) and analyzes the overall rhetoric of “Letter to B——” (38–52)]. Hartmann’s monograph began as his 2005 dissertation, “‘Neither in nor out of Blackwood’s’: The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prose Address” [Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2005; abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International, abstract no. DA3159216]. Defining his areas of interest as antebellum American literature...